I used Straight Talk wireless as my cell phone carrier for about a year a half. They saved me a lot of money, but man does the company suck! Straight Talk‘s customer support is based over in India and every time you call you end up getting transferred or you get put on hold for an hour or longer. This only proves to me that American’s will put up with a lot to save money. If they didn’t Straight Talk would have been out of business the first year it opened.

I recently transferred a number from AT&T to Straight Talk. According to my StraightTalk.com account the number ported over successfully, only that it didn’t. The phone # was still listed in my AT&T account and when I tried placing a call with the Straight Talk sim card in the phone it would show up on the caller ID as some random number that I’ve never seen before! When I called Straight Talk the guy was silent for 30 minutes only to tell me that it was a porting issue and that he’d have to transfer me. I then was put on hold for 45 minutes only to hang up, because I had to go to work.

I tried calling back to explain the issue all over again and no one could comprehend what happened. I ended up going to Wal-Mart and picking up another Striaght Talk BYOP sim card kit and transfer the number again and spend another $50. I basically wasted money on the first transfer as it never really went through. After I did the transfer a 2nd time, it went through almost immediately and worked.

Straight Talk support is so incompetent and frustrating to talk to that it’s almost worth it to pay the extra $30 a month for a regular carrier so that if you need to call in you will get an American you can actually understand!

I’ve had other issues with Straight Talk, but this last one got me so riled up that I had to post about it.  I don’t use them as a cell phone carrier, but for something else (I won’t get into it… it’s too complicated.)

Hopefully if you’re thinking of using Straight Talk you won’t have any horror stories to share.