Forum Discussion
Auto-pay failed and lost service
Some basic details to start: I am pre-paid, with auto pay set up to go through monthly. The payment method is valid, and lately I haven't had issues with auto-pay doing its thing. 4 or so times in 2019 I'd receive a text alert that I was past due, but the auto-pay would go through that day and I never lost service (that I could tell).
For this next billing cycle, I was already paid for December and good through 12/31/19, and the next auto pay was set up for 1/1/2020. However, I lost cell service once it turned midnight January 1st. Once I had wi-fi access again a few hours later, I was able to manually add money to my account but then the auto pay went through at 8am and now I have two charges from my bank account. Of course I can use that for the next billing cycle, but I keep close tabs on my budget so I would've preferred to just have the one charge.
Once I had service/data again later on 1/1, I received a few texts from T-Mobile between 8:00am-9:00am EST: two stating that money was added to my account, two that I was now paid through 1/31/2020, and one that my payment was past due.
I set up the auto-pay for convenience but this has happened a few times since being with T-Mobile, and I'm starting to think that I shouldn't have set it up or that I need to adjust something with auto-pay.
Has this happened to anyone else? Is auto pay set up to only go through after 8am? Is there something I need to adjust or do to prevent this from happening periodically?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Hola @juniper114
I am so sorry to hear that you have had issue with your autopay not deducting the funds in time causing you to lose service 😥 We are currently aware of this issue and are working on a fix but we do not have an ETR at this time. In the meantime, if this issue occurs, the best way to resume service is by making a manual payment as you have been doing.
Hola @juniper114
I am so sorry to hear that you have had issue with your autopay not deducting the funds in time causing you to lose service 😥 We are currently aware of this issue and are working on a fix but we do not have an ETR at this time. In the meantime, if this issue occurs, the best way to resume service is by making a manual payment as you have been doing.
Hola @tmo_chris,
I am also experiencing this issue and the T-Mobile Support Chat resulted in the rep not being able to assist me. My prepaid plan was due today, but the auto-pay failed saying my card was invalid, but it's not. I made a manual payment with a different card and can see the funds available on my account, but my lines are still suspended. Can you please assist me in restoring service to both devices on my account?
I got the same message this morning. Something similar happened back in October. I just checked my email and AT&T, my former carrier just collected a payment from me! Did you guys make my account revert to them?
@nicolehuertas92 - I am super sorry to hear you are running into this issue as well! Is your service still suspended? If the line was suspended and then you made a payment after, it can take up to 2 hours for the payment to process and service to restore.
@heyhew - We would never revert your service back to your old carrier. If you are still being charged through your previous carrier, I would recommend you reach out to them to see why they are still billing you.
Hey Chris, thank you for getting back to me! It's good to know that at least it isn't just me, because I was feeling a little crazy when it would happen every few months.
It is now Feb, 2021 and the T-mobile website cannot even set up autopay anymore. The webpage takes all your information and then just says something like "setting up autopay failed" without giving any reasons. I called customer service, and after 30 minutes I got somebody from the Prepaid expert team to help me. The expert admitted that the T-mobile webpage cannot set up autopay - it is an internally well known problem since quite some time, and they do not know when it is going to be fixed. We tried to set it up over the phone me giving him all the details he needs. It failed again. The expert blamed the many attempts, which likely caused my bank to block the card and said to call back in two weeks ("do NOT use the website"). I checked with my bank: They don't even see a single attempt by T-mobile to charge the card. T-mobile has a severe problem here, which apparently dates back to more than a year ago. Very disappointing performance. I would like to hear back from T-mobile in this regard.
