Tracfone company profile

Cons: coverage isn't as good as other companies

Summary: I've used tracfone for about a year and a half and it's been great. i started out with the little $15 phone then went to their $40 camera phone and recently bought the $80 phone with double minutes. the double minutes is the way to go especially if you buy your minutes.. i buy the $20 card with 60 minutes and ( on the internet) when i go through the checkout i can add another 60 minutes for $10. so with double minutes i get 240 minutes for $30. that is 12.5 cents a minute and about 4 cents per text sent or recieved.. overall i've had a good experiance with them. the worst part is i don't get service in some places that most people do with other phone companies.

Cons: Everything

Summary: If you are considering buying a Tracfone, DON'T.

It would be far easier, and certainly quicker to just flush your money down the toilet instead of giving to this bunch of fraudsters.

They will gladly take your money for phones and airtime cards, but getting the service activated and operable is next to impossible.

I've spent the last week trying to activate a phone, and in the end, all the Tracfone "customer service" dept (that's a joke in itself) could suggest was that I return the phone to the retailer (not possible), and to tell me that the airtime cards were non refundable.

Basically they are comitting fraud by taking money, but then refusing to provide the service that was paid for.

The only reason that I have rated them as poor on all counts is that there wasn't an option for abysmal.

Summary: I bought my son an $80 phone which came with double minutes for life. When I activated it I asked "if he loses the phone what do I do?" and they told me "just go to your local reatailer & purchase another tracfone and we can transfer everything over". He did lose it one time and I had to deactivate the service for a few days and I asked again what I should do if we never find it and was told the exact same thing. Well he lost his phone again and I purchased another cheap tracfone & when I went to activate it was told that they would tranfer the phone number over, but I no longer had "double minutes for life" because the phone was lost. After speaking to a useless supervisor who spoke no better english then the customer service rep and could care less about my lost phone I decided to cut my losses & return my cheap phone. I had already spent $80 on the phone and $25 on the minutes card. The customer support is terrible, you can barely understand them, becuase it is loud and they barely speak english. I spent more time asking them to repeat themselves becuase I had NO IDEA what they were saying. I would NEVER buy another tracfone. I have had Virgin Mobile in the past and their customer service was great, they spoke English & were friendly & helpful. If you see tracfones in the store, even if the phone is cheap and the deal sounds too good to be true, keep walking, its not worth it.

Cons: Everything except no contract. Took over 7 hours and 34 telephone conversations to get it right!

Summary: Tracfone contracts to various carriers to provide cellular service. When I purchased the phone for my parents I explained that Tracfone should not assign AT&T as the carrier because that carrier does not work in my area even if the computer shows that it does. The type phone purchased was a Motorola. Got the phone, they assigned AT&T and it didn’t work. They said it must be a defective phone because their computer shows that the carrier works in my area. (It’s important to note that my parents and I have the same zip code and live two miles apart.) They sent a second phone. Same brand, same carrier, same problem. After talking for hours to technicians with thick accents using my Verizon cell phone minutes I decided to take the next step and call the corporate headquarters in Miami.

I called Miami corporate headquarters and got a person who said that the Motorola phone purchased had old technology and that what was needed in this area was an updated digital phone so they sent me an LG with different capabilities. I insisted that they assign Verizon as the carrier since AT&T does not work in this locality. I got the phone and tested it before I gave it to my parents. I set up the voice mail and thought the problems were behind us. Everything was working fine.

A few days later I called my mother's Tracfone and the call went directly into her voice mail so I left a message. I called back later on their landline and made certain she had the phone turned on, which she did. I told her I would call her back on the Tracfone to test it out because something doesn't seem to be working correctly and to my surprise the phone was answered but it wasn’t my mother. It was a woman who was in a boat in the middle of a lake. She said she had a problem with the number Tracfone had assigned to her and so they gave her a new number which was my parent’s number. This disabled my parents new Tracfone! Once again I called Miami corporate headquarters. They deactivated the number of the “woman in the boat” and reactivated my parent’s phone. Problem solved? No! Now I could call in but they still could not call out. I called Miami headquarters back. They said this was very unusual and that there must have been a computer glitch. The technician went into the computer system and corrected the problem. Finally we have an operable phone!

I have documented 34 telephone conversations with Tracfone technicians, many of whom have such a thick accent I found it difficult to communicate. I’ve also spent a total of 430 airtime minutes from my own Verizon personal cell phone getting this resolved. So the bottom line is we now have a Tracfone that works but is it worth spending over seven hours talking with technicians to get these problems solved? You decide!

Cons: Everything except the price.

Summary: Initially, there was no problem. I registered and activated the phone with no problem. I generally use my home and work landlines. The cellphone is just for job hunting and emergencies. I have no idea when the tracfone stopped working, but I got a call from a headhunter one day. At the end of our job screening, he mentioned that my cellphone was not in service. Oh, I thought, it probably needs charging. No, he said, try calling it. It says the number is not in service. Sure, enough, that's what I got when I tried calling it. So, I went online to see what was up. I bought a 1-year card when I bought the plan. The phone showed that I still have 893 unused minutes. My account status online was INACTIVE. I tried to reactivate and it told me I needed to call customer support.

That's when things really went wrong. Customer service is in India. I can deal with that. I've lived with Indians. I can understand the accent. Unfortunately, this person really couldn't speak English. Beyond that, the person appeared to be a total moron. The call took an hour. She kept asking me the sam questions over and over and over again. She couldn't keep straight the serial number from the SIM number. I am not kidding--I had to read out those long numbers at least 12 different times. Forget about trying to get any explanation for what went wrong. All I got was that the SIM number was no good. It's the number on the SIM card, it's the number on the labels and booklet that came with the phone, and it's the number the cellphone display shows. It worked just fine when I first bought it a couple of months ago. So, they'll ship me a new SIM card, which could take 7 days. (That's assuming she got the phone, name and address correct, which I doubt. I had to keep giving her those over and over again too.) She had no answers. It was clear that everything she said was being read off a script card, and she kept stumbling over the words like it was the first time she had ever seen them and had no idea what they meant.

I bought the phone in early January and this is the end of May. Anyone care to offer an opinion about Tracfone extending my service to cover this whole period of time that I thought I had an active cellphone but really didn't? I'm just grateful I never had my car breakdown and hope I haven't missed any job opportunities.