I just found out today, 24 hours before leaving for France, Austria and Hungary, and 50 Euros of credit in United Mobile SIM, that United Mobile is offline and the +423 cards have been phased out, with no help in sight. No one has been able to get credit, or even get in touch with anyone at United Mobile. Apparently, there is some “restructuring” in the works but that will not help me or all the others now with non-functioning United Mobile cards and a lot of credit on that account.
This link, started a few days ago, explains the problem. You might want to start on the last page.
Liz, I will close the identical topic you opened in the Everything about Travel forum and will link the two discussions, to have them under one single title.
Liz, thank you for the heads up. I was planning to use my UM card in France next month, so I'm glad to have the alert. Fortunately a friend has lent us a French SIM card, but we were hoping to use the UM card so my husband and I could each have a working phone.
I just tried to log on to the UM web site, and although the home page comes up, the accounts are inaccessible. My number is a +44 (not +423) but from the discussion you linked to, neither one is working now.
I guess I could take our Italian SIM and use that on roaming just in case of emergency.
It's too bad, as I have recommended United Mobile in the past, and it has always worked well for me on several trips to Europe.
I have credit on my card as well so.........i contacted them. I just got the following answer which appears this is how they are going to make changes from 423 to 44. Dear customer, thank you for your request with the subject Card Update. It will be processed within a short time and has been given the ticket-ID [Ticket#1016463] For further queries regarding your request please always include the ticket-ID in the subject.Due to a high volume of requests, it might take some days until your request will be answered. Thank you for your understanding. Best regards Your United Mobile Customer Service Will update if I hear anything.
I wrote to UM as well, and the first message I got back was identical to Joanne's. A few days later, I got this:
quote:
Dear Customer,
Since 04/15/2009 we are suffering from a complete outage of the +44 platform. We are working on a solution of this problem with all our effort.
With best regards
United Mobile Customer Service
A few days ago I could log in to my account, but it showed a zero balance. Now it does show a balance of $37, so that's progress.
I guess I will take the SIM with me to Europe and see if I can get it working there.
The discussion on the prepaidgsm forum indicated that there was some kind of problem with automatic recharging (which I do not have) that caused them to freeze all the accounts.
