I’ve used Red Pocket for most of a year. I now want to port out to AT&T, and attempts by the latter to accomplish the port repeatedly fail. Red Pocket claims they have gotten no request, but posts online suggest RP is a bad actor. I doubt there is a solution to this standoff, so I suggest people beware of Red Pocket.
File a complaint with the FCC.
Good suggestion, and I’ve done that. However, any response will be long past the useful time for me to keep the same phone number. I’ll have to abandon it.
Perhaps I should have mentioned in my original post that I gave AT&T the account number and PIN for the port. Also, that I confirmed with AT&T by phone that the store agent had made port requests to Red Pocket. I’ve made 7 calls to RP about this. The first agent said the port would happen while I waiting on the line, but at precisely 8pm my time the call disconnected after I heard the recording, “Thank you for calling Red Pocket. Goodbye.” In the subsequent calls I’ve been told repeatedly that AT&T didn’t make requests, and even that my address and code weren’t valid, though I was looking at my account info on the Red Pocket web site at the same moment. Of course I had to validate the address to receive the port out PIN from RP. Whether a company has a good history of porting out is an important factor in choosing a cell provider.
The number may not have been released back into the pool, I think they may hold it because numbers recycled immediately might receive many calls for the previous owner.
I had a similar issue when trying to help a neighbor port a number from the local telco to a VOIP provider.
I requested a port on the VOIP site and you must supply a page from the current providers bill with the address of service. It appears the local telco played games (intentionally or not). I finally opened a complaint with the FCC. It was listed as an un-official complaint but it had to be sent to the providers porting manager. The port happened a few days later.
This issue was that the customer had two numbers on different bills. The number that had issues apparently was a virtual number and thus had no official address. The first port attempt used the number on the bill - rejected. The second time we used no address because that is what the telco told us to use - rejected. The third attempt was to use their plant address - rejected. Thus I contacted the FCC.
When a request to port out is submitted it goes from the receiving provider to an automated system which automatically verifies the data and apparently has no artificial integgegence. When the FCC complaint triggered a manual intervention, it helped solve the problem.