
Straight Talk does now offer a 2 line, unlimited ultimate plan for $90 a month. Otherwise, Verizon’s family plans range from $140-220 per month. MetroPCS does have some good family plans that are worth looking into. Unfortunately, Straight Talk doesn’t offer a family plan. Verizon: Family Plansįamily plans are generally where budget carriers have the edge over the big four. Some also come with carryover data for one month if you pay your bill on time along with mobile hotspot support.įinally, Verizon offers postpaid plans and traditional 12 and 24-month contracts. In addition, they routinely offer promotions like new customers receiving double the data and other options to incentivize further customers switching to them.
Unlimited: $70 per month $65 with autopay discount. 16GB: $50 per month $45 with autopay discount. 6GB: $40 per month $35 with autopay discount. It wasn’t immediately clear Wednesday who may have been behind the attack on TracFone, but the company said in the website notice that it tried to notify customers, “but given the nature of this activity, messages to impacted mobile telephone numbers may no longer be accessible by some customers.” TracFone urged customers to change their PIN numbers and said it had made “enhancements” to improve security. This is when a fraudster poses as the owner of a phone number, opens an account with a different cell phone carrier than the victim’s, and has the victim’s phone number transferred - or “ported out” - to the new account with the different carrier. Last September, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said it was looking into strengthening rules to reduce cell phone scams, including port-out fraud. Simms said his number was finally returned after 12 days, and he’s planning to change providers but hadn’t done so as of Wednesday. He said Total Wireless customer service was unhelpful and told him it had requested MetroPCS return his number, which MetroPCS told him wasn’t accurate. Simms was among dozens of people who told The Verge they had their numbers unexpectedly ported to Metro PCS beginning in December. He said as a small business owner, he was losing money because clients couldn’t reach him, and the company didn’t appear to have any remedy for him. “This inactivated my phone number so I cannot receive or make any calls,” Simms said in an email to The Verge earlier this month. He chose the plan to save a bit of money and says he and his wife were happy customers most of the time.īut on December 31st, he says his phone number was ported to another carrier - Metro PCS - without his permission. Steven Simms of Atlanta has been a Total Wireless customer for about three years. More importantly, we do not ever possess or house the account number or PIN data that TracFone requires to validate an account and is necessary to conduct a port out of a TracFone customer, so this cannot occur from our side of the porting exercise.” She added that the company was working with TracFone on the issue. T-Mobile spokesperson Tara Darrow said in an email to The Verge that the company had investigated the issue, “and there is no fraud or data breach of any sort on the T-Mobile side of these port-outs. Some saw their lines had been transferred to Metro PCS, which is owned by T-Mobile.
The company did not reply to numerous requests for comment from The Verge, but the WSJ reported that some 6,000 customers were affected. “We were recently made aware of bad actors gaining access to a limited number of customer accounts and, in some cases, fraudulently transferring, or porting out, mobile telephone numbers to other carriers,” TracFone said in the notice. Its Straight Talk and Total Wireless brands were affected as well. Customers of Verizon-owned TracFone saw their numbers transferred to different carriers without their consent in recent weeks, as part of what the company characterized as the work of external attackers, according to a notice on its website (via the Wall Street Journal).