Comments | siderea: [tech, phreaking] Oh, that's not good

siderea

[tech, phreaking] Oh, that's not good

Apr 18, 2015 03:26

Now would be an excellent time to short stock in Tracfone (actually América Móvil).

I have been trying to give them money for two weeks now, and it has gradually becoming clear, something is going very, very, very wrong with the computers on their end. The computers which back the web site, the customer service agents' desktop systems, the credit ( Read more... )

phreaking, tech

Comments 13

dr_tectonic April 18 2015, 16:04:36 UTC

If you don't use the phone much, pay-as-you-go can be a good way to get dumbphone service for cheap. Up until a couple months ago I was using T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan, and I only had to refill it a couple times a year. I'm pretty sure it averaged out to less than $10/month, but if not, it certainly wasn't much more.

siderea April 20 2015, 04:26:13 UTC

I thought I wanted pay-as-you-go, but then I hadn't been able to find any deets on PAYG offerings. I literally can't find anything on T-Mobile's website about PAYG. Where do I find the rates? Where can I buy airtime?

dr_tectonic April 20 2015, 05:00:19 UTC

Wow, yeah, they don't particularly want to drive business on the website to PAYG, do they?

After some hunting about, I finally found this page, which has all the info:
https://support.t-mobile.com/community/plans-services/prepaid-plans

Looks like the new plan is $3/month, which gets you 30 minutes/texts. Beyond that, its $0.10 per minute/text. (I was on the old plan, which is no longer available for new customers.)

You can buy more minutes on their website, or by calling *ADD from the phone and feeding your credit card info to the phone tree, or by texting the magic number if you have your account set up for it, or by buying a refill card at Target/Walgreens/etc.

siderea April 21 2015, 02:53:31 UTC

Can you buy minutes in arbitrary batches? (At Tracfone, you have to buy blocks in pre-set denominations, e.g. 30 min, 60 min, etc.) Also, do minutes expire? Like, if you have the $3/mo plan, and only spend 10 min/mo on the phone, do you get to accrue 20 min per month indefinitely? (Hopefully asks the woman with 1,500 minutes accrued on a Tracfone.)

(ETA: I'm asking you because T-Mobile seems uninterested in being informative about this service, which is not filling me with optimism about being their customer. How have they treated you?)

Thread 7

mellyjc April 20 2015, 02:48:53 UTC

Hmm. I have called multiple times this week to activate an upgrade. Didn't get a sense of this other than at one point they said their Android service thing was down and to call back.

Could this be part of why I get "my account" as not found? I had to fight the woman for the 150 minutes she tried to short me in the transfer but can't find any way of verifying that I actually got them.

siderea April 20 2015, 04:23:42 UTC

Your account on the tracfone.com website is "not found"?

mellyjc April 21 2015, 02:40:44 UTC

No, the online stuff is fine (although still comes up with the ancient email, which she supposedly updated on the phone last week). But on the device. Either way, I have no way of viewing how many minutes I have (as far as I can tell).

siderea April 21 2015, 02:51:00 UTC

So... your phone can't tell you how many minutes you have? It's giving you some sort of "not found" error message? (I don't know Android, so maybe that's why it's not immediately clear to me what you mean.)

I would not be surprised to find out that new phone activations were wonky too. When you talked to tech support, did you notice that they take a super long time to get the computer to do anything on their end?

Thread 6