I had a TracFone account a couple of years ago and let it lapse. Today I tried to reactive the account, and then create a new account when reactivation didn’t work. I’m taking a long road trip and I want a phone – just in case. My phone showed a message on the screen “Unregistered SIM card.”
All my attempts to get the phone working had failed, and I eventually talked to a living being. I was told the account had expired, and my SIM card was deactivated – permanently. No, I couldn’t open up the phone and give them a number off the card so it could be reactivated. The only way the phone will ever work again is if they mail me a new card to put into the phone, which will take 3-5 business days and I’m getting on the road tomorrow.
AND – I can’t use it even to dial 911 in case of an emergency. At least, so they said. I asked because I really had no intention to use it unless I get stuck out in the middle of nowhere.
I paid money for this phone, completely apart from the deal I had with TracFone. Have they killed my phone, or is this some weird policy issue that I could avoid by calling some other provider who COULD activate my existing SIM card? Unfortunately this would mean kissing off the $20 I spent for the minutes I thought I was buying from TracFone.
If you bought a SIM-free phone separately from TracFone, there’s no way they could disable it. You just need a new SIM card to reactivate the phone.
And not being able to dial 911 is wrong. All phones in the USA, regardless of carrier, SIM, or whether it was stolen or not, must be able to phone 911 as per FCC rules.
As I understand it, your SIM contains identification information that basically uniquely tells the phone network who you are and what carrier you are associated with. When you let your cellphone account lapse (regardless of carrier), the identification information on your phone’s SIM card no longer points to a valid account.
Given the number of cell phones that are retired every year, it doesn’t surprise me at all that a particular carrier wouldn’t retain the relevant information on a lapsed account over a period of multiple years just in case someone attempts to reactivate a phone that old.
I suspect that whomever was on the other side of the line simply didn’t know that you can still call 911 with that cell phone (and he/she really should have).
IME, TracPhone does not like to reactivate / modify SIMS.
I once activated two used phones with new SIMS, was assigned new numbers and then decided to port a different number to them. T-Mobile did it in a flash with no hassles. TracFone had to send me a new SIM.
I have a Tracfone I don’t use much. It’s mainly for emergencies and keeping in contact with my elderly mother when I’m out. I routinely buy the $19.99 card that gives me one hour of talk time and keeps the phone active for 90 days. Because of the deal I got when I bought the phone, I actually get triple minutes, and I get three hours talk-time. That’s not really important, except that three hours usually does me quite well for 90 days.
There was a period recently where I wasn’t really doing much outside the house, so when the end of the 90-day active period ended, I let it lapse, intending to reactivate in a couple weeks. When I tried to add more airtime to my phone after a 2-3 week lapse, I learned that it wasn’t as easy as simply adding airtime. I had lost my phone#, and essentially had to register the phone all over again. Fortunately my phone# was still available, so no harm, no foul. I won’t let it lapse in the future, though.
The above doesn’t really answer whether they ‘destroyed’ your phone, but it speaks to their attitude regarding old/lapsed accts.
If you have a Best Buy nearby, pop in there with the phone you have and they’ll set you up with either Tracfone or another no-contract carrier. I bet it will take just a few minutes.
I’ve had a Tracfone online account for 10+ years; at one time having 5 active phones on it.
If you recently paid $20 for more time/reactivation they should do this just keep calling…and waiting…and waiting… Each call center person is going thru a menu of solution choices and some operators are way better that others. And you can ask to speak to their supervisor.
Last year I bought my wife a pretty nice touch screen Tracphone off Ebay. The help center didn’t like that I wanted to add an already-activated phone to my account. After about four help sessions - maybe 4 hours - they mailed out a new SIM chip and it works properly but I will never buy a used Tracfone again.
But I can imagine after months of deactivation the phone time is lost. There is an $18? option to keep a Tracfone alive for 90 days without adding time.
They didn’t do anything to your phone; it’s as good as new. They didn’t do anything to your SIM card; it’s as good as new. it just doesn’t point to an active account in their computers any more.
Your only problem is you need a new SIM card that does point to an active account and they can’t deliver one as fast as you want. Because you forgot to plan ahead.
Yes, but it’s not making them money, it’s costing them money. They’re not charging me for the new card. They’re paying for the card, shipping and handling, and the person who spent 20 minutes on the phone with me, and not getting anything more out of me than the time I already bought, which I would have spent anyway without all this additional hoop jumping.
A SIM card is the only secure way to control the registration of a cell phone; everything else can be hacked, rooted, changed, cloned or bootlegged. It’s like having a key to the network. If TracFone has a policy of permanently blacklisting SIM cards that have been inactive for X number of months, and using a procedure that doesn’t allow for them to be reactivated, it’s pretty sensible tech-business practice, like changing the locks on an office complex from time to time.
You really seem a little out-put by a minor inconvenience, which TF - which does NOT have the best customer service trac record - is quickly fixing for you.
There’s another interesting property of large businesses: they don’t really understand it or believe it when their processes cost them more money than they make.
Business process engineering is fine in principle, but if you don’t predict all the possible circumstances, some of your choices will have negative affects. Maybe they literally never planned for someone trying to re-activate a years-out-of-service phone, so they did the only thing they knew to do.
Alternately, if a business foresees some extreme edge case circumstances, it may decide that it’d rather eat the slightly higher cost of servicing those circumstances with a less-than-perfect process than pay the cost of supporting those edge cases with a more directly appropriate process. Like, for instance, the cost of supporting you or someone else in your situation a few times a year is judged to be cheaper than maintaining terabytes of outdated account and SIM information… less storage to buy and maintain, less backup costs, etc.
I’m sure a beancounter told them it’s better this way.
I don’t know enough to dispute this, but – what are their risks? I would presume, though maybe I’m wrong, that there is some serial number on the card that I could tell them over the phone, and they could then start an account that they could link to the phone.
If they allowed this, what nefarious and devious things could I do?
I sincerely think you’ve missed the point in trying to make a sweeping condemnation of corporate business practices.
If you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of customers, most of whom (in TF’s case) are low-end, low-profit, high-maintenance types who will go to another provider at the drop of a hat, a call or a CS rep with an accent, you can ONLY function if you streamline procedures to accomplish as much as possible while costing as little as possible. Trying to accommodate old SIM cards in perpetuity probably causes far more headaches, hassles and unwanted costs than just “burning” them and providing new cards to the small number of returning customers who let their account lapse for 6 or 12 months.
They - and the vast majority of low-end service providers - can’t provide absolutely individualized service to every person, even if the outliers seem to end up costing more money as a result.
You? Not much. The endless ranks of phone hackers, bootleggers and service thieves? Enough, in aggregate, that a policy of “burning” abandoned “keys to the system” is a highly sensible practice.
I don’t understand. Why would this open up “keys to the system” in any way? It links a particular phone to a particular account and tracks the use of that phone, as I understand it. What is the danger to the company? Or, what am I not understanding about the technology that would make changing their current policy dangerous to TracFone?
Frankly, I don’t disagree with the beancounter, particularly. Simply pointing out, as you are, that there are business reasons for doing what they’re doing. Really, you’re just restating what I said, before my toss-off line that you decided to fixate on for unaccountable reasons.
I hope you’re not taking exception to “beancounter”. Because I’m not going to stop using it. Beancounters are a necessary evil, but that doesn’t make them any less evil. Just necessary.
There is … if you work through their phone tree to “technical support” versus simply customer service, they will ask for both the phone and SIM serial numbers which can be read both physically and through the phones display. The tech guys enter numbers into their computers and can set certain functionality. But I also think the SIM chip can be irreversably “killed” by certain account tranactions and the techs can’t change this.