Well, if that's true, then the telcos are violating the law BUT they claim these rogue SIMs don't "appear" in their database, so their excuse is they couldn't do anything about it? How absurd!
@gowin Exactly.
Years ago, with my prepaid SIM, that was their explanation why they can't fix the issue with my number. Slowly, ₱1 or ₱0.50 is deducted from my load.
They claimed I subscribed to their promos, so they asked me to load up and they'll unsub me. Their agent was confused because he saw for himself I was telling the truth that I never subbed to any of their promos.
Called their engineer, they searched for my number, and the final explanation was that: my number is in their old database that they cannot search. I should change number instead and they'll deactivate my current number since it's old.
Like. No.
I had no idea then it was a real explanation and not an excuse.
@gowin My colleague shared when he requested to have his SIM card upgraded to 5G, he was told that they can't do it because his number is old, from the 1st/2nd gen era, and can't be transferred to their 5G database. They tried to convince him to give it to them. LOL.
@youronlyone@c.im @rom @youronlyone@firefish.social wouldn't that be a violation of the numbers portability law?
Not sure. If the reason is technical, and they truly cannot do anything with 1st and 2nd gen numbers, maybe they can get away with it? Especially considering people doesn't want to return those numbers to them after they explained the situation.
@youronlyone@c.im a friend of mine also had this problem years ago with Smart. The store said they can't upgrade the SIM to LTE since it's too old. We went to 3 different Smart stores, got the same excuse. A year later, I gave him those self upgrade LTE SIM cards. It worked
@jepoy Interesting!
I wonder what the reason is actually why they have this "old number" reason. Theoretically (logically?), it should be easy to transfer to the new system / database since these are prepaid SIMs. I would understand if these were postpaid, since grandfathered plans probably are not in the new system.
@youronlyone@c.im Porting the number to a different provider then porting it back might do the trick though.
@jepoy Haha, good idea.
A hassle, but that can work, if being an old number / old database/system is the issue. Hmm…