First of all, some background - I've been a loyal T-Mobile customer for almost 4 years now, all this time running the same Flexpay family plan with unlimited data plan. My billing cycle start day was the 7th of each month (this will be important later in the story). As some of you may know, Flexplay plans have been discontinued some time ago, but I kept mine and didn't want to switch. On October 22nd 2013 T-Mobile sent me a text message stating that my plan is going to be changed at some unspecified point in the near future (because they're simplifying things, yada-yada). This sucks, of course, but what can you do. Then comes the extremely bad service part:
On December 17th, 2013 (that is, around the middle of my then-current Flexpay billing cycle), I took my phone out of the pocket only to find out that I didn't have internet access. I called my wife and it turned out that she didn't have internet access either. I called T-Mobile to find out that apparently they turned my 2-line family plan with unlimited data into two new separate plans without any data at all! All without so much as calling and asking me! It's not like they didn't have my phone number, you know. Even so, given that I was on a family plan with unlimited data, how about at least transferring me to a similar plan? Why separate lines? Why no data? These days, data service is very often vital to people's jobs. I mean, the only thing they could have done worse at that point would be to just cancel my service outright. Only after hours of chatting on T-Mobile support site, then calling and being switched back and forward (I counted 7 times during one call), in 3 days I could finally get my two lines back on a (new) family plan with data.
That's not the only thing that went wrong though. Having my plan "transferred" so abruptly, I also lost online access to all the previous account information - billing, usage, what have you. Not only this have been a huge hinderance (no way to check my previous data usage to figure out what new plan I need, much harder to file expense reports for my employer, etc.), but it almost allowed T-mobile to get away with the last, juicy part - the stealing:
As I mentioned before, my Flexpay billing cycle start day was the 7th of each month. The Flexpay plan was a pre-pay - meaning that on 25th of each month T-mobile charged me ~$117 for the next billing cycle that would begin in ~12 days. Naturally, they did the same on November 25th 2013 - for the billing cycle of Dec 7th - Jan 6th. But that cycle only went for 10 days - since on December 17th I got "simplified", and started a new billing cycle. Consequently, no service was ever provided for the remaining ~$79 (that is, $117*(31-10)/31 ) left from my Flexpay monthly payment! And T-mobile did everything they could to prevent me from figuring that out by completely revoking access to my Flexpay billing information! Too bad I had most of the previous bills printed out for my expense reports. Too bad for T-mobile, that is.
Now, there were millions of customers that T-mobile had to move from Flexpay to new plans, so I suppose some mistakes were inevitable. Or perhaps the effort of calculating the refund T-mobile owed me was two high to issue it immediately. Because of that, I gave T-mobile one month to figure things out on their own. As you may have already guessed, nothing was done. Have I not followed through, T-mobile would have pocketed my $79 as I'm sure they have pocketed lots of other customers' money. "Don't play by the rules"? Oh yeah, they're doing that all right.