Our son has had a GoPhone for a couple of years now. We refill his account every 3 months with a $25,00 phone card and had the 200 message bundle on auto renewal. Currently there is far more money in the account than needed for the monthly feature package.
He uses his phone very little which is why we chose a prepaid for him and why he never used all of his messages in the bundle. They have been rolling over to the next month ever since he got his phone and last time I checked there were over 4500 unused messages on the account.
Yesterday he told me that he was charged 20 cents for a text message. When I checked his account I saw that his feature package had been removed in January by AT&T. I called customer service and was told that it was removed because he is not using his phone enough and that he is not allowed to accumulate more than 3 months worth of messages. I cannot find that stipulation anywhere on AT&T's website. On the contrary, it states that >>the package balance rolls over if renewed before the package expiration date<<. Since the feature package was removed by AT&T in January we lost all prepaid messages when the package should have renewed this month.
The customer service rep filled his account with 2000 messages "as a courtesy" but told me that we would probably run into the same issue again soon because " he already has more than the allowed 600 messages". ( 3 times the 200 messages/month).
The next day I went to the local at&t store to talk to someone in person. He also did not know about the "3 months rule" nor could he find such a rule on the website, The local representative agreed that the prepaid messages should not have been removed,reinstated the 200 message automatic renewal feature and promised that it would renew and roll over without any further problems. While that replenished 200 of the lost messages we are still out about 2500 messages - roughly $62,00 worth. The rep stated that he was not authorized to add messages or money to our account and that I needed to contact AT&T directly again.
I did but was only told that
if a line is not used for three consecutive months the user risks cancellation of the line of service
That was not the case as the phone is being used just about every day for a call and a couple of messages. He could also still make/receive calls and text ( for the non-bundle price of 20 cts), proof that the line was not cancelled. Only the prepaid, unused messages and the automatic renewal feature were taken away.
At this point we are out of $62,00 worth of prepaid, unused messages and are getting the runaround: phone rep to local rep to e-mail support without any results.