Beware of the Mint Mobile / T Mobile merger prepaid internet and phone card scam. Mint mobile is asking for more information from holders of these cards to activate them.
I purchased a Mint prepaid SIM phone/ data card via eBay for prepaid mint mobile unlimited service. It has a printed expiration 2025, but on more than one occasion, the company has told me it is ACTUALLY 2023.
T Mobile makes it very difficult for people who bought these cards to activate them. They are sold and resold on sites such like this, mercari and Poshmark, while Mint Mobile only seems to accept Sams Club, Target and Best Buy as true distributers. It’s the acceleration of T Mobile cutting off internet access to many that used Mint Mobile before their merger.
Nobody likes spending $50-100 on prepaid internet, they will never see or use. The amount of time the average person has to spend to activate these cards is obscene. If it doesn’t work on their app, where these numbers frequently don’t work, they can try a browser at mint mobile.com/activation, where they will frequently be given an error code. If they can’t activate there, they can try the chat room, where “the system won’t let us activate your card” is the standard reply. They can try phone support, but even there, these printed expiration dates do not apply.
Damages here a far beyond denying or suspending internet access, they involve peoples time and communication equipment. When someone replaces their phone sim with a sim that WILL NOT work while purported valid on its surface, especially if they need internet access to activate it, that is damaging.
Basically, you to get an order number and date when the card was originally purchased for the card to be functional. If you don’t have these things, the company can deny the card is valid and if it is held more than 45 days, per their data, it is invalid outright. None of this policy is printed on the card.
I guess it’s just printing “bandwidth that will never be delivered” corruption now. Cards with nonfunctional activation codes and invalid expiration dates in the future.
As if internet access and telecom corruption could get any worse under the FCC.
