Net10 Steals Minutes on Failed Text Message , Internet

This has happened with any Net10 phone I have ever had, and with all plans/pay as you go.

My phone will say I have service.... I will send a text message.... My phone will say message cannot be sent... Then my phone will deduct the minutes for sending that message. 

Seems to me that this is illegal. You cannot charge someone for service you do not provide. Net10 says it costs half a minute to send a text message of up to 160 characters (extremely small, my texts usually use one or two minutes because of that), it does not say it when they fail the send the message.

This happens to me quite often. I will write a long text message and try to send it, in an area where I have service. Then my phone will fail to send that message two or three times in a row, deducting minutes each time, until eventually it succeeds.

Because of this I am often getting charged three or four times as much for each text message.

I called their tech support line and after speaking with someone who was clearly to low on the food chain to help me, I finally got transfered to a supervisor. I had to explain to the supervisor (just as I did the tech support person) that my phone is irrelevant and that this problem will happen for EVERYONE because it is an issue with their service. After about 10 minutes the supervisor stopped trying to give me BS answers (one of them was that it was because the other person's phone was off) and realized I am not an idiot and what Net10 is doing is illegal. 

She eventually added 100 minutes to my phone to "resolve" the problem.

I am writing this report because I do not feel the problem is resolved. Those 100 minutes do not recover the hundreds of minutes I have lost over the last two years I have had my phone, and will not cover the hundreds of minutes I will continue to lose because of this issue. 

Furthermore adding 100 minutes to my phone does not fix the problem for everyone else. What they are doing MUST be illegal because they are charging for a service they are not providing.

I think the problem has to do with a miscommunication in their network. When a message is sent it will pass through a part of their system that checks the size of the message and then deducts the minutes, and then the message will continue on to where it is supposed to go. But if it fails then your out those minutes. Their system should first check to see if the message was successfully sent before deducting the minutes, but they do not do this.

This is an easy fix, IF they wanted to fix it. But I have a feeling they know about the "problem" and use it as a tool for syphoning minutes off people.