I have to post about this because its actually mind blowing to me how brutal Public Mobile / Telus are running this service and being allowed to.
We just ported over from Koodo to Public. Upon sign up and port there was absolutely no warning about porting over from Koodo but yet when we get to the activation stage it fails at the very end of the port process and says we need to contact support and there’s nothing else we can do.
After over almost a day to get any decent unmanned responses from CS_Support they tell us that there is an issue porting over from Koodo to Public and that we have to sign up and assign a random Public phone number first and then email support to ask them to do the port manually to replace the randomly assigned number. So after days trying to get this sorted out we finally do that and provide all the details they asked for (which was a lot) from the previous carrier, account numbers, eSIM number, IMEI, old carrier account number and name.
Not to mention at this point we have paid for the original Public Mobile account to be created which they have charged us for and not refunded yet, which is stuck in an activation state. Now the new account had to be signed up for with a different email address (as directed by CS_Support). So now we have two accounts and now they have charged us on this new account as well. Both accounts have all the information required and a valid credit card on file that hey have now charged twice.
So after going through this entire painful mess, and a few more days of abysmal response time and generic canned messages from CS_Support they finally do the port over. And the service is now working and active, or at least we thought LOL. We get a response from CS_Support saying the port was successful and the new account and service are active and that we are good to go.
We use the service for maybe a couple of hours before the eSIM goes dead and right into SOS only mode. We try to login to the customer portal to see what is going on. Now all of the sudden we cannot login to our Public Mobile account it says we are “unauthorized” and the account is locked and we need to contact customer service for more information. What a joke. We escalate again to CS_Support who takes another day and a half to get anywhere with, and now we get a message back from another random CS_Support agent saying that the account has been locked for fraud purposes and has been sent to the fraud department and we need to send them pictures of our government IDs and our credit card and a piece of mail with our address on it over email or fax LOL. This is completely insane. All we did was follow the CS_Support reps instructions on their convoluted way to port over from Koodo to Public. So we escalate to a manager with the community support and a manger gets back to us after another day, reiterating the same thing and saying they have no control over it and we need to send those things to the fraud department.
So I tell her that we want to port our number back out and this is rediculous. And she tells us that we can’t until we comply with their completely unreasonable demands. So now we have two useless accounts, have been charged on both of them, had to sign up for and set both of them up. Waited for days and days of extremely inefficient communications with people who mostly have no clue what is going on. Jumped through all of their hoops and processes just to get where we are now, which is all the accounts are useless, they are holding our phone number hostage and none of our services work LOL. To add insult to injury the CS_Support manager says that if we get the information back to them today they “might” have time to activate the service by Monday as its a weekend. So now we have been without service for days, are exhausted, they have taken our money twice and our phone number and tell us that we cannot do anything about it or speak with anyone LOL.
This is unacceptable behaviour in our opinion and we are escalating this to the CRTC (CCTS) department and reporting Public Mobile for unfair practices and for holding our phone number hostage for absolutely zero valid reasons. When I asked the Public Mobile manager why our account is even disabled for what reasons, she said she can’t even tell me they just see it as disabled and they cannot find out any information for us.
It’s completely mind blowing to me how telco service companies are allowed to operate like this in Canada and the behaviour that they have been getting away with. Had we known we would have to go through all of this we would have gladly stayed with Koodo and paid more money for a worse plan.
Complete Joke…
