Online (Prepay) Bill Payment Not Working - AGAIN

The issue is with T-Mobile's systems.  You either need to pay your bill in store or call Customer Care and have them manually add your card to your account to use it for payments.  

This has happened to me as well for the last 3-4 months. Can’t update my billing info online. So I call. And they say they will update my zip code. And then the next month the payment fails and my line gets suspended. And then I look online and the zip code is my old one. I can’t make an online payment because every card number says invalid. So I call….again. Someone “fixes” it. Rinse and repeat. It’s not you. It’s not your OS. It’s not your browser. It’s them. I wish you luck because they have not been able to provide a lasting resolution for me. This is my last month with them because of this issue that they can’t seem to fix. 

 I am in essentially the same boat (long-term pre-paid user), experiencing the same problem.

I’ve setup my auto-pay for the 25th of each month, expecting that to leave plenty of “lead time” before the 1st-of-the-month due date, just in case for some reason the payments don’t process on weekends, holidays, etc.

In the last 7 months my auto-pay has failed 4 times.  The first time or two I assumed maybe I had just run up enough additional charges (e.g. extra $0.10/min charges if I used up my first 100 mins early) that my balance was insufficient -- not improbable, since my autopay amt is only approx. $5.00 above my basic monthly charge.  

But when it happened again yesterday (1/1/2021 “account suspended” text received), I started looking more closely. 

First, I confirmed autopay was (still) on, still set for the 25th of each month, and still using the same non-expired card that had worked just fine on 3 of the last 7 months.  Then I did a one time payment to get my service restored.  (using the same on-file card -- same exp. date, same zip code, same security code - no changes were needed or made.)

Next I dug through my credit card statements to indentify all T-mobile auto-pay charges that had posted on the 25th of each month (or sometimes the day after).  Here’s what I found:

It just skipped applying the charge to my card on 4 of the last seven months, for no obvious reason. 

(BTW, a clear pattern might have emerged for me if my billing / payment history was available to me on the pre-paid customers’ account mgmt web site.  But given that T-Mobile hasn’t yet fixed this problem after months of related complaints on this site -- despite the fact that fixing it is in the company’s interest, you’d think they’d *want* to get paid on time! -- I have low expectations for the pre-paid site being upgraded to include billing history in the foreseeable future).

On a related discussion on this site, I saw some responses from a T-mo employee saying basically “we’re aware of the issue and working on it, but don’t have an estimated fix date”.  Come on, throw some development resources at this!  I’m a software developer, this isn’t a rocket-science problem.  As others have noted, plenty of other businesses (phone services and otherwise) seem to manage auto payments with no problems.

One last thought:  Perhaps T-Mo has outsourced this service. If so, did you switch vendors recently (or did the current vendor switch / upgrade their software)?  I ask because, while reviewing my credit card statements to find when (or whether) my auto payments had posted over the last 7 months, the “description” entry for the (successful) 6/26/2020 posted charge was:

“VESTA T-MOBILE 888-2783397”.  

But since that one, all subsequent charges posted (whether the successful auto payments on 9/25 and 11/26, or the payments I made on-line on 8/3 and 11/1 because the 10/25 and 12/25 auto payments failed) have instead had a description entry along these lines:

“BP 888-278-3397 OR”

Maybe my bank just  unilaterally changed how they print T-Mo’s charge descr on my statement.  Or maybe T-Mo just changed the descr they send with their charge.  But either way that in itself shouldn’t impact how the auto pay works (or fails to work). 

However, it *could* correlate with some broader change that took place between my scheduled 6/25 autopay (which successfully posted on 6/26) and my scheduled 7/25 autopay (which never posted). 

So if T-Mo’s billing service is outsourced, you should demand that the vendor fix it -- or get another vendor. 

And if it’s inhouse, you should bump this issue up on your development priority list… or get yourselves some better developers.