Saria
Atlanta,#2General Comment
Thu, June 17, 2010
have you tried calling VZW directly? If you are a previous Verizon customer and it's only been 2-3 months since you transferred your services, I am sure they still have you in their system and would be able to tell you if your numbers were transferred out to StraightTalk successfully. Verizon can also tell you if your numbers have been recycled to a new customer. I doubt that the Straight talk rep was able to get all the info to in a matter of 2 minutes of having you on hold. She would have had to call Verizon, spoke to rep, verified some information and then have them look it up. That Straight talk rep probably just told you that to get you off the phone.
Ceadda
PrivateTown,#3Consumer Comment
Mon, June 14, 2010
I have always advised anyone getting a prepaid phone to just take whatever number the carrier will assign you and live with it because of the deactivation problem.
Basically, when you port a number, despite what most people would think, the number/account has to stay active in the computers of the original carrier that number was from.
The phone carrier you port it to is now responsible for providing info as to where that number is currently residing and if it is still in use to the old carrier.
Prepaid carriers are very, very bad at this. Most likely because in a prepaid system the "In Us Until" date is only a month in the future, sometimes less.
Rather than a good ole "your number is safe for the next 2 years" sort of update, the carrier is going to need to get monthly? bymonthly? maybe even weekly updates with some prepaids, just to tell them your phone numbers still being paid for.
Although its usually longer than a couple months, the "oops we forgot to update that" happens a lot.
As to your old numbers suddenly being in use just like that? I'd say yes. They probably are, simply because you'd had them so long. Verizons system just picks a random available number when it signs up somebody new. After 5 years, they were probably long ago out of numbers for that particular prefix and went on buying new prefixes as needed. The moment 2 opened up in an old prefix... BAM, first pick for the random system would be those two numbers as they'd be higher up on the list than the newly purchased prefixes.