A woman shares her frustrating experience with T-Mobile after leaving a relative’s phone plan to start her own. She claims the phone carrier is “scamming” her by leaving her fully paid-off phone inoperable unless she covers charges that aren’t hers.
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In a video with over 739,000 views, TikToker Drowsy Lola (@drowsylola) explains that she signed up for a T-Mobile phone plan with a relative. The original promotion allowed her to turn in her old phone and receive a new one with no payment, as long as she stayed with T-Mobile for two years.
However, she discovers that her relative was behind on payments and decides to get off the plan. She calls T-Mobile to try to transfer her phone and coverage to a separate account. T-Mobile tells her she has to pay off her phone in full and settle the rest of the account.
“I made a payment of over $1000 dollars to get my service back, because it was cut off,” she explains. “Then I made a second payment in store of over $900. They confirmed the phone’s paid off.”
After settling the charges, she makes her own account and sets up her bill on autopay.
Why did T-Mobile cut her service off?
Then she goes to dinner on May 17 before a night shift and realizes she didn’t have any signal.
“I kept getting this little notification, ‘SIM rejected,'” she says.
The TikToker drives to the T-Mobile store and asks them what’s wrong with her phone. They discover that T-Mobile transferred her number to her new account but left her phone on the old plan.
“They said the only way around this is for you to settle this account that you’re no longer on, which was $1700, or to buy a new phone,” she says.
She reminds them that she paid off her phone in full to move it to the new account. The TikToker borrows someone else’s phone to call T-Mobile. She says she stayed on the phone for 4 hours trying to escalate the situation to a supervisor.
She claims that the customer service workers repeatedly asked her to tell her relative to pay off their phone bill.
“No, that is none of my business. We do not live together. We have no relation anymore,” she continues.
The TikToker turned off comments on the original video, but notes that other customers shared similar experiences.
Did T-Mobile release her phone?
In a follow-up video, the TikToker says she finally got in touch with an executive, who told her that her phone had been “locked” and “blocked.” She says even if T-Mobile unlocked and unblocked the phone, there was no guarantee it wouldn’t revert within months.
The TikToker says T-Mobile initially offered her a $270 refund. However, she says it wasn’t enough. She shares that she lost her job and health insurance because of her lack of phone coverage. Plus, she had to purchase a cheap phone through another carrier in order to have access to a phone number.
After hearing that the phone she paid in full would be inoperable, she filed reports with the Better Business Bureau, the Federal Communications Commission, and her state Attorney General’s office.
In an email to The Mary Sue, the TikToker says, “After filing reports with the FCC & BBB, they did reach out saying they alerted T-Mobile and they had 30 days to reach out to me with a resolution.”
She continues, “The state attorneys general office called me back to get more information, but I have yet to complete the formal complaint with them since the issue has been resolved.”
In another update, she shares that T-Mobile reached out to her again to set up a call after receiving the BBB report. However, they didn’t change their tune until she created an X account to share her experience.
“Within 30 minutes they got back to me very apologetic. He had my phone unlocked and unblocked within that 30 minutes and guaranteed in writing that it would not block again with another carrier,” she says.
She followed up with the first executive and asked for a full refund on her phone payment and all charges on her account, as well as compensation for the cheap phone she purchased while waiting for a resolution. She says T-Mobile accepted her request.
@drowsylola #tmobile #scam #badbusiness #lies #legaltips
♬ original sound – Drowsy Lola
The Mary Sue reached out to Drowsy Lola via email and TikTok direct message and to T-Mobile via email for further comment.
