I recently purchased the Cingular Wireless prepaid "GO Phone" service. I chose the "Pick Your Plan - $49.99 a month service."
This plan allows me 400 prepaid minutes, as well as free nights and weekends. Specifically, each minute is costing me 12.5 cents per minute. I own a Motorola V300 phone that has a timer for each phone call to let you know how long the call was. Cingular's prepaid service also sends you a free text message after each call to let you know how much that call cost. Sounds great, right? In theory, it should be an ideal pre-paid situation.
When I first got the service, I noticed right away that some calls which were only about 50-55 seconds were costing me $. 25 -which is for two minutes. I called customer service, and the gal said that it could be one of two things. Either my timer is a few seconds off, or it could be that the call actually took longer to connect/disconnect than what the timer actually showed.
Ok, fine. That seemed like a reasonable explanation. So I continued on. But then I was noticing that when I checked my voicemail (or when I left others a voicemail) and made only a 30-35 second call, it was STILL charging me $. 25 for each call. I called customer service again and talked to a gal named Brittany.
Her statement?"Any call using a Cingular Pre-Paid service that is over 30 seconds is considered to be a full minute."??? So I calmly for one full month, then I technically get only 200 minutes with this plan?"
Her reply was, "Well, I suppose you could look at it that way." I was flabbergasted. There was nothing she was willing to do about it. She said that most people don't notice because they don't keep track of how long the calls are and how much they were charged per call. She didn't know why anything over 30 seconds was considered to be a full minute. But does that even make sense? NOTHING is stated on their website (where I purchased this service) and I am outraged that this is even legal to do. My 400 minutes went so fast I needed to refill halfway through the month, and that's even using my free nights and weekends!
I tried to talk to a manager and speak to someone about this obvious fraud and lack of disclosure, but no one would talk to me.
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