Carrier “lost” my number in a port request

First I would use unlec.com to determine where it is currently allocated. The SPID/OCN tells you who has it. SPID = Service Provider ID; OCN = Operating Company Name.

Then look at the LNP history, which is the history of who and when the number was assigned/re-assigned over the years.

Tell both companies that you will be involving the FCC and try to reach the "porting group" who will be able to fix this. Porting problems happen all the time, even with 99% of ports (that might be an optimistic number) happening in a nearly-automatic fashion. (EDIT: I mean the porting group at each company, not the FCC).

I operate a telephony service (perhaps similar to the one you parked your number at) and we do thousands of ports a year from our service to major carriers. Porting is such a backwards pre-internet system and things go wrong all the time unfortunately.

My guess is that the port went through but US Mobile has lost it in their system.

One of the biggest issues I see is when porting from a VoIP service to a carrier. The carrier doesn't always know what to do since it is slightly outside normal; the majority of their customers are moving between major carriers. But now your number has been classified as a "wireline" (VoIP) number and US Mobile is probably confused.

Honestly, I bet it magically arrives at US Mobile after a bit of time. But if you can't wait, I'd engage the VoIP service again. They likely operate downstream from a provider such as Bandwidth, Twilio, or similar. Their team can ask their upstream provider for a "snapback" of the number - essentially they can go take it back. That will leave you with your number back at the VoIP service to try again when you're ready :)

With all that said, I do have access to these upstream systems and some more advanced lookup tools. Shoot me an email (in bio) with your number and I can do some research for you if you want. Good luck!

Can't help you sorry, but this also is such a massive downside to 2FA. It's totally possible to get locked out of your services semi-permanently due to really simple or likely mishaps.

I've encountered a similar but less problematic version of this simply by being abroad somewhere my provider didn't cover.

Can you provide some additional details on the VoIP service? When you say "parking it on a VoIP service" do you mean that you ported from T-Mobile to the VoIP service or do you mean you forwarded your calls to a VoIP line and continued to pay for T-Mobile?

Who botched the port request? You would have initiated the port request via US Mobile when you signed up for service. They wouldn't depend on T-Mobile "having the number", they would have looked up who had the number and initiated the porting process.

You can see which carrier "owns" your number by going to https://freecarrierlookup.com/.

Now, if you cancelled your service BEFORE you ported the number, then you may be SOL as the number would have been released. Even if not reassigned you may not be able to get the provider/carrier to release it since it is no longer in your name.

Something similar happened to me: my phone number of 15 years was active on the Sprint cell network via an MVNO. Evidently, when the network was decommissioned, the phone number "disappeared" with it. According to the carrier, it was my responsibility to switch to a new SIM card. The company never notified me of that responsibility, or the deadline. In July, the number stopped working, and I spent maybe 20 fruitless hours on phone support with my carrier, with T-Mobile (since they are the operator of the Sprint network), and with Sprint (which I guess sort of still exists despite being acquired by T-Mobile). The MVNO subreddit had several agents handling this exact problem, claiming they could fix it, but they could not.

I ended up getting one piece of potentially useful advice: after a while, the phone number will possibly get recycled into a generally available pool. IF that happens, and IF I check at the right time, I MAY be able to purchase the number at https://www.numberbarn.com/.

After all that, I just ended up getting a new number. It has now been four months. I check that site a few times a week, no luck yet. I also call the number occasionally, I have a script prepared to try to convince whoever answers to listen to my stupid plea. It's still disconnected.

As for moving forward: just get a new number. You may get the old one back eventually, but don't count on it happening at all, especially not quickly. I had no trouble updating my number for bank accounts. I don't understand why you would be stuck with your old number for a background check service, seems like you should just be able to provide them with a new number.

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/porting-keeping-your-ph...

There's a complaint link on that page

We recently "lost" a business number during porting. We had a consecutive block of 400 numbers, but a single number was mysteriously ported to a company called "Neutral Tandem" instead of to our new carrier. Baffling. Nobody from our new or old carrier has any relationship with them, nor could they do figure out how that happened. Nobody from either carrier could get the number back after several weeks of effort.

When contacting Neutral Tandem we got a "You're not our customer, and we have no records of you owning that number. So we can't tell you what happened or how to fix it, sorry."

So the number is effectively gone, and I am experiencing neat-nick anguish from having a single hole in our beautiful list of 400 consecutive numbers (which have been used at our company for more than 40 years).

Anyone from Neutral Tandem (now called Inteliquent I think) here on HN and willing to help?

Complain to the FCC for one. This process is highly regulated.

Solution - need some big pull to get this done.

The number needs to be recreated at the original provider (assuming no one else has picked it up), activated, ported multiple times (if you have ported earlier) and then brought to the current final provider.

Source - lost a 20+ year old number during a port activity the same way. Fortunately the provider was a client, and got a circle head involved to recover the number in the way it is mentioned above. Took a week.

Not to pile on but this is just one of the many reasons why SMS is bad for 2FA.

https://sec.okta.com/articles/2020/05/sms-two-factor-authent...

Why would T-mobile have your number if you ported it out to the VOIP service a year ago?

Did you ever confirm it arrived at the VOIP service? The last place you can confirm you had access to the number is where you should be looking.

Yeah they will do that when they're being idiots, which is quite often. There should be a hold on it being reassigned, if the porting request is recent, keep on hounding them until they get it worked out, if it's been awhile, you're probably hosed.

This brings back memories. I was working for Cingular when WLNP was first introduced. People were constantly trying to swap and chase after the deals, because every carrier was trying to outdo the next with a better deal.

At the time, Verizon system, apparently just didn’t work. We were seeing greater than 90% failures porting from Verizon to Cingular. The Verizon system would release the number, but then never send us the request to transfer. We would call Verizon’s WLNP support and they would just shrug and say there was nothing they could do. There were so many irate people that had lost their numbers.

We found sprint to be the most reliable

It was a long couple of months while the bugs were worked out.

When this happened to me I called the investor relations number and the next day a VP called me and said it was sorted out.

I doubt it being hundreds of hours.

Most will require two government IDs to be sent in to remove 2FA and 1-2 week process to review & confirm.

Moving forward you should look at Yubikey where you can with the backup being your phone via Authenticator app.

I just had a similar experience. I cancelled my landline phone service, and was told that I cannot port the number anywhere, or even forward it to another number. The only way I can retain access to it is to retain my phone service with Western New Mexico Telephone. I thought there were phone number portability laws. Do they exist? Are they full of loopholes? Are they being flouted?

Same thing happened to me about 5 months ago. I ended up email the CEO. Had an executive relations staffer email me back within minutes, and I had my number back within about a day. YMMV.

That’s not what gaslighting means. I really want to punch whoever entered this phrase into the popular lexicon because it’s used incorrectly at least 99% of the time.

Hey this is Doug from T-Mobile. I'm just calling to let you know that we've sold your phone number and you'll be getting a new one.

If it were me, I'd already have started moving on. Any legal recourse is going to take a rather long time. And you've already tried to get each service to grab the number. So if anything is time sensitive, I'd choose to do what I could. Possibly with a different company than either of those 2.

This is one reason why I have a Google Voice number. If my underlying. number is "lost" I can just reconfigure GV. But there is some (increasingly rare) 2FA that does not work with numbers other than telco numbers. When you sign up an SMS vendor for 2FA, make sure it works with VoIP services.

Have you tried the folks at the USMobile subreddit... https://www.reddit.com/r/USMobile/ ...There are employees over there. Also, hopefully your previous service hasn't been cancelled.

Looks like you haven't got past 1st level support to have someone technical to look at this. Maybe their CRM "lost your number". Anyways, there are good suggestions on this thread. And telling you are going to involve some 3rd party like FCC should get you past 1st level support, I hope.

In the old days we'd have hundreds of DID numbers, and we'd port service from whatever provider was the best deal at the time...we ALWAYS lost a number or two.

At some point I think AT&T or McLeod even said "What number do you want to lose when you port this?"

I feel for the OP. I would just like to plug a good porting experience I had with Twilio recently. I ported a phone number from Vonage to Twilio. They did an excellent job keeping me up to date.

I totally expected something to screw up, especially on the Vonage side.

Recently I switched to Verizon from a pre-paid service subsidiary of T-Mobile and had some porting issues myself. I totally commiserate with you, but there is hope.

I left the store at end-of-business before the porting was totally complete and the in-store rep couldn't contact the porting team because they'd already gone home. I had data and could receive incoming messages but couldn't make outgoing calls or texts. The in-store rep assured me I could handle this myself the following day. He didn't mention the hours of bullshit I'd endure. I persevered for the same reasons as our Bojangles Aficionado above, but, honestly, I don't know that I saved myself the time that would otherwise have been spent re-authorizing myself on my 2FA accounts.

The gist of the story is that the junky prepaid service didn't give me the right account info from the start, so when it came time to port, Verizon couldn't help me unless I produced account numbers, PINs, and zip-codes. The zip-code was from an address I haven't lived at for 10+ years. (That remains a mystery and is somewhat concerning.) At some point, I was trying to socially engineer the zip-code out of the T-mobile subsidiary rep, which eventually just turned into a plea.

I don't have a magic solution for you, but here are some thoughts about how I'd approach your situation:

* I would recommend continuing to call and escalating as high as you can go. My principle with customer service of major corporations is that if I don't like the response I get, I call back a maximum number of three times. If I get the same response 3x in a row, then that's a hard policy that I'm not going to bypass. Chances are though, whether by human error or a policy designed to be flexible, I will get some leeway.

* Related to the above, in calling back a few times, you might find that the technician you talk to in subsequent attempts is more qualified, experienced, or simply desires to handle your problem efficiently. Essentially, play the game more to win.

* I would also recommend getting T-Mobile and US Mobile on the phone with one another. They have the capacity to do this, and they might discover the problem together as opposed to being able to punt to the other side. Make yourself a nuisance. At the end of the day, you're in the right here.

* Last bit of advice I can impart is make sure you are absolutely speaking to the right team. Most customer service lines are structured in such a way that the first line (FLS) filters out people who don't need specialized help. The problem I faced with Verizon was being asked repeatedly by FLS who staffed the Porting hotline number to do the same troubleshooting steps (e.g. reset network settings on my phone) before speaking to the actual team who handled porting. Verizon might not be structured like T-Mobile or US Mobile, but at some point I was getting detailed information about the status of the Port from a Tech Support rep who ultimately had to hand me off to the Porting team to finalize it.

Good luck!

This is one of the reasons I don't trust 2FA. Too easy to lost access to online accounts.

I've had that happen, i tweeted to verizon and they fixed it.

If you parked it at a VOIP how were you able to use the 2fa?

Ask your U.S. Senator's office for help.

Call a lawyer.