3 Months ago our contract with T-mobile ended and we went searching for a new cell phone company. We heard about Straight Talk Wireless and the plan seemed perfect for us.
$30 all you need gives you 1000 Minutes, 1000 Text Messages and 50mb of Web
$45 unlimited
Are the only options for the plans. The $30 Plan was perfect for us. We went to Walmart and Purchased Two Phones. My Phone was A Samsung Phone with a Qwerty Board. My Husbands was a Lg slider that advertised Real tone capability.
We Purchased the $30 cards in store for the first time and took them home and activated ONE them. Activation was simple when done online and relatively fast. The ease of use ended here.
Once my Husbands phone was activated we went to another part of Straighttalk.com to purchase ringtones for my husbands phone. After looking around we discovered you can purchase one ringtone at a time. So we chose our ringtone and checked out paying with a debit card. The Instructions said we would receive a text message with the download link. The Text message that arrived was full of gibberish. There was no way to download anything so we called customer care to find out what we needed to do.
What Followed was 90 Minutes of head banging frustration. After about 10 Minutes hold time we were connected to a rep who's English was difficult to understand. We explained the problem and she tried to walk us through repeating what we had already done. When It all failed she asked us to purchase a second ringtone so she could monitor what went wrong and she would refund the first purchase. We proceeded to do this. The second purchase resulted in two more gibberish Text messages. We confirmed the phone was in fact able to download the ringtones and even found a video showing someone doing it.
The Rep at this time alluded to our phone being broken and needing repair and tried to sell us a new handset. We played along that, OMG yes it was broken wasn't it. Then we dropped the Bombshell that In fact the Phone was brand new. The Rep changed her story and said that the phone was perfectly fine and it was a problem with their system. This was not a surprise.
At this point we asked for the second ringtone purchase to be refunded and hung up for the night. It was extremely late. The Next day after trying out the Phone and finding the call quality was acceptable we went ahead and activated my cell phone.
By the 24 hour activation mark with my husbands cell phone, he had received 39 Text messages from Straight talk about downloading his ringtone. All of them were gibberish. The Text messages continue to this day 70 Days later at all hours of the day and night.
The last two Months were paid for by credit card. Both months I needed to call in to get the credit to post to my husbands account. Both times took 2 phone calls and 15-20 Minutes each. Now the Third Months payment has been double debited. So Instead of Two Payments of 33.15 Being Debited We had $33.16 Debited once and $33.15 Debited Twice for a total of $99.46. The Representatives have done nothing to correct the problem that I can see.
We called in 3 Times and asked that all text messages from Straight talk stop being sent. They have, but not the Gibberish messages. Turning off the ringer for the text messages solves nothing as we receive Genuine messages also we need to be able to get on time.
Then Again, Ive sent group picture messages to 5 People and had only 2 get them. But was charged for all 5. Friends also report Ill send one message and they get 4 copies of it.
All in All, If you need a cheap phone and service this may work for you. But Only if you can live with the complete lack of service, rogue text messages, and the time consuming task to calling Customer Care every week to work out the bugs. Considering this is Set up through Verizon, Net 10 and Trac Phone, I expected Much more from the company.
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