The Port-Out Fraud Nightmare
These assholes are just placing me on hold and blatantly dropping the call. All day long. They repeat their robotic lines pretending to help, and then claim they're transferring me to another department, then my call magically gets dropped. Call again, another 20 minutes on hold. Same shit. Even the call back option leads to being placed on hold. I'm convinced they're under orders to just dick us around as long as possible, knowing full well they have no solution currently. Had one guy feed me some bullshit about how he's "watching a bunch of numbers and letters on screen, and waiting for the update to take place." What update? And what does the update do? He wouldn't answer. He just kept mumbling a bunch of word salad and placing me back on hold. The call eventually got dropped. Just like the many before it.
The closest thing I've gotten to any movement on this was a woman named Mia. She was seemingly able to retrieve the number and restore it to my device. I logged into my account on the ST website and it says that my device has in fact been reactivated with my number. So it IS possible. However, my phone itself still says "No Service" up in the corner. Mia suggested I go outside for a better signal and try to make a call. When I did that, I just got a "you are roaming" recording, which appears to be from VERIZON. It's doing that for any call I try to make. So ultimately, I still can't make calls.
I reset the network settings on my phone. Took out my sim, put it back it. Restarted my phone. All of the above. I still can't make calls.
As I type this, I'm in the 14th circle of hell. 14 rounds of this nonsense. This time, it appears someone picked up but simply isn't saying anything. Possibly turned their mic off. Just dead silence. I assume they're hoping I'll hang up. More dicking around.
My personal theory is that someone within straight talk is responsible for porting all these numbers, maybe even one of their higher ups making a quick buck somehow from all this. And the lower cronies are just in crisis mode repeating the same shit to all of us because it's all they can do. Only two of the ones I spoke to even acknowledged that it's a widespread issue. Most just desperately pivot with more word salad.
I had to call out of work tonight and lost money because of this, just to run around in circles with this absolute joke of service provider.
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Update: Following the advice of another user on this sub, I had a three way conference call between myself, Metro, and ST. And before I continue, I want to say bless that Metro representative’s heart for staying on the line with me for 82 minutes as we navigated through the purgatory of Straight Talk’s customer service. I forget her name, but she had much more patience than I expected.
As for the call. Initially, the Straight Talk representative just fed me the same old bullshit about how they’ve sent the email to Metro’s port department and need a 24-48 hour turn around time to retrieve my number. He said Metro hasn’t responded yet. When I revealed that the Metro employee was actually on the line with us, the straight talk dude froze up a bit. The Metro employee told him that they had received NO email about my number in the last 7 days. ST guy then changed his story and said Straight Talk’s porting department was sending the email “right now.” All three of us knew that was bullshit.
Finally he opened up a bit more and said thousands (yes thousands) of numbers were affected and they’re overwhelmed. He also said the first department that you speak to when you call Straight Talk is on the lower end, and they only have access to certain information. So they might confidently tell you something that’s completely false because they don’t have the context that another department has. (Hence me being told my number was “retrieved,” when in fact it’s merely an inactive number associated with my account.) A giant clusterfuck of misinformation, essentially. And it doesn’t help that the higher departments LOVE to drop your call when you get “transferred.”
The metro representative also said Straight Talk is sending these port requests in bulk. But even searching the bulk emails, she confirmed my number was NOT in there. This is despite ST telling me multiple times that the request has been sent. It was never sent, and I’m on day 3 now.
Conclusion(?) I’ve somewhat given up on this. I activated a cheap android phone from Target yesterday with a new number (NOT with straight talk) so I can at least go back to work. I’ve missed two days! It’s a temporary solution, but I can’t miss more work. I hope this Straight Talk nonsense gets sorted out in the meantime, but my fingers are not crossed, and I will not be dedicating nearly as much time into this shit show.