WARNING: don't use T-Mobile's web site to buy minutes

T-Mobile has two policies regarding purchasing prepaid minutes on its web site that I think are extremely unfair and potentially harmful to its users.

1. When purchasing minutes on its web site using a credit or debit card, T-Mobile will freeze the needed funds in your account before it decides whether to actually give you the minutes. If you are using a card for this transaction that you have never used before, T-Mobile will not credit the minutes to you unless they verify the card with you and the issuer of the card. (More about that later.) If they can't reach you within a few hours, they simply cancel the order. You don't get the minutes, but you don't get your money back either. Your funds remain frozen until the hold drops off in five days or so.

If T-Mobile wants to question the purchase, isn't the time to do that BEFORE they have frozen your funds, not AFTER?

2. T-Mobile's method of verifying that you own the card in question is to hold a conference call with you and the issuer of your card. In my case that is CitiBank. With me on the line, the T-Mobile representative contacted the CitiBank and expected me to disclose to Citibank (or whoever they called) the security codes that would prove that I owned the account.

I don't know about you, but I am not going to give away the access codes to my bank account to two total strangers. What would possess me to be so stupid? That is nothing more than a gold-plated invitation to identity theft.

T-Mobile imposed both these policies on me despite the fact that the name and address of the card I was attempting to use was identical to the name and address on my T-Mobile account. Go figure.

no that aint true i have a tmobile sidekick prepaid which rocks