Is Simple’s system too Simple?

OK. I will start by owning up to my central role in this fiasco right away.
Let’s start from the beginning. I decided I had had enough of giving Simple Mobile “free money” and decided to transfer my phone line from Simple Mobile to H2o Wireless. Why “free money”? Well, the cheapest pay-as-you-go package on Simple is roughly $28 ($25 plus sales tax) for unlimited talk and text (they added 1GB data to the package a month or two ago). I have had my line since December last year and I make possibly 5 calls a month. I recently “discovered” H2o wireless. One way or the other I discovered BestBuy carries the H2o SIM (I think I might have googled it). I then ended up on the BestBuy website and had an online chat with one of their support people. I told the fellow in explicit details where I was and what I wanted to do. He agreed that I could walk straight into the BestBuy in my city and that they would do the transfer for me on the spot. I finally got a friend to drive me to BestBuy. Sauntered to their “mobile” desk, waited for my turn only for the gentleman to look confused when I asked him about the H2o wireless SIM card. He then called someone else over his phone and finally said they don’t stock them in that shop. They had it in a shop a 100-miles away or so. He apologized after I told him I chatted with someone on their website who said I should just visit the shop. I thanked him for his time and my friend googled the card again and it showed up on the Walmart site (on Google). As Walmart was about 5 minutes away and we were out already, we decided to go there. Same issue again, they didn’t have it at the local store but they also had it at some city some distance away.

I headed back home and decided to order it online. Did I mention that my Simple service was going to expire the following morning? Amazon had it (the H2o Wireless SIM Starter Kit) for $1 but by the time you added shipping it came to $3+ and would take some 10 days or so to get to me. I checked on Walmart and they would ship it to my local store in 5 days at the same cost but fortunately as you will see later, the minimum order quantity is 2 units and the total price from Walmart (fortunately as you will see later, the minimum order quantity is 2 units) for roughly $3 (so basically, I was getting two SIM packs in half the time and for the same amount I would have got 1 unit on Amazon). To be accurate, it was being sold on Amazon by a third-party retailer.
I was pleasantly surprised when I got a notification 3 days later that my package was ready for pickup at the local Walmart Supercenter. The following day, I got another friend to take me to the store in the evening. I wanted to be sure I didn’t make any mistakes with the transfer so I chose to wait till the following day when I could get on a chat with someone from the H2o website to guide me through.

I think here is why I made the snafu. I had the transfer request form open in one window and was chatting with the lady (Missy-H2o) in another browser window. The form had several fields including a “call back number”, “number to transfer field”, “Simple account number”, and “Simple PIN/Password.” I added a third window to my “multitasking” session by launching a chat window with Simple Mobile support to confirm the Account number and password. Back and fort between the 3 sessions, the auto-complete popped up in the transfer form ad I selected it, unfortunately, because I choose the Chrome auto-complete for my email account, Chrome automatically entered all the associated details in the other forms. So while the “call back number” was correct because I typed it in, I somehow missed the fact that Chrome had entered my cousin’s number (also using Simple mobile but in a city some 16 hours away – I had stayed with him briefly in December so I used his address and phone number as contact details for a number of online forms I filled out before getting my own SIM which was how chrome came to associate his number with my email address). To be accurate, it appears H2o sent me a summary of the request immediately but as I used a Yahoo! Address and was extremely busy yesterday, I didn’t see it until 2 days later (I might have been able to rectify the issue if I had seen the mail immediately).

Anyway, I opened the mail today and noticed the error. Got on a chat with Dee-H2o over on the H2o website and after lots of explanation, she claimed both accounts appear to share the same details. To which I insisted the only thing common is the billing address. I had no idea what his Simple account number and PIN were and I am not sure he even had an online Simple account. The only conclusion was someone dropped the ball along the line. Finally Dee-H2o suggested I contact Simple to find out how they managed to transfer the line if the details were incorrect. In the meantime, to transfer the number back to Simple, I had to load the line with $10 H2o credit (which was the cost of the transfer) and then have my cousin request a transfer back to Simple. I asked Dee-H2o (I somehow assume the name belongs to a lady?) why they charge for the transfer when Simple doesn’t: she ignored the question. My conclusion in the meantime was that Simple didn’t verify the data in the transfer request which means one could initiate the transfer of any random number and it would be carried out?! Scary!

“Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

“Yes, what about the transfer of my original line?”

“You can re-initiate that transfer afresh, but you will need a new SIM, because the new SIM your cousin’s line was transferred to is now useless” (once H2o transfers the number back to him). So it was fortunate I got 2 SIM cards from Walmart.

So onward with my Israelite’s journey! I opened a chat up with Simple mobile, pasted my chat session with Dee-H2o into the chat window and asked Ingrid to kindly take time to read it. She came back and said she couldn’t find a record of my cousin’s number in their system. Duh! I told her Simple already transferred it to H2o which was part of the “conversation” I sent to her.

In the meantime, I tried to contact my cousin and couldn’t get through for obvious reasons. I finally got through to him through his fiancé, and he confirmed that his line went off yesterday and he had contacted Simple to complain and they kept insisting someone with access to his account had requested a transfer of the line to Tmobile. He contacted Tmobile and they had no record of the transfer. He immediately yanked his credit card from the Simple account thinking maybe someone was trying to steal his identity.

I got back to the lady and repeatedly told her that the transfer request should have failed unless Simple wasn’t verifying the data included in transfer requests (unless of course it was only the billing address they verified – maybe it’s all about the greens! Lol). I asked that she escalate the issue which she said she would. I also said they should provide feedback to both my cousin and I (which I suspect won’t happen until hell freezes over) and I told her I would make her famous! And that for my $10, I would at least get a good story out of the whole issue for my blog. Thumbs up to Ingrid, she remained polite throughout though I assume she was probably wishing I would go find someone else to bother. I told her that it looks like if I had her number, I could go request a transfer of it to H2o and it would succeed which is scary!

If you have $10 to burn and have a line on the Simple platform, it’s worth a shot. Get a new H2o SIM, then go initiate a transfer of the line from H2o (you can open a free account) and ensure the PIN and account number fields are wrong but put the right line number in the “line to transfer” field, and see if the transfer succeeds. Of course, you will need a $10 top-up on H2o to transfer the line back to Simple and the hassle and probably a new Simple SIM as well.
If they are smart, someone is reviewing my transfer request right now to figure out what went wrong.

So, the question is: “Is Simple’s system too Simple?”

NB: if Simple gets back to me with an explanation (even if it’s something else I did that made the transfer go through I will update this blog entry).