Virgin Mobile Auto-Topup broken for months

My wife still uses a Virgin Mobile prepaid phone, despite our previous run-in with their rampant stupidity (we stuck with them because they solved our problem in the end).

Unfortunately, their stupidity is on parade again.

My wife’s account is configured to auto-topup, i.e., every time her balance drops below $5, they’re supposed to automatically add $20 to it, charged to our credit card. However, when the balance dropped below $5 a month ago, auto-topup didn’t work. This means that my wife was unable to make calls when she needed to, since her balance eventually got low enough that the phone would not let her make calls.

When I complained via email to their customer service department, I got back an unintelligible response from someone whose first language obviously was not English. I complained again and got back this more comprehensible response (apparently when you complain, they escalate to someone who can speak English): “… our Headquarter specialists are aware of a system outage that is preventing the auto top up option from working properly. They are already working hard to find the root cause of this issue and get it fixed as soon as possible.”

I optimistically assumed that “as soon as possible” meant that the problem would be fixed before my wife’s balance dropped below $5 again. It did, after all, have the word “soon” in it.

Alas, the balance dropped below $5 a week ago, and again, the phone did not topup automatically.

Idiots.