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Sometimes the smaller companies with the lower prices can end up being a nightmare. That seems like the case with MVNO Mobi.
We’ve reported on Mobi once before, during a Cyber Monday sale last year. At the time, the company was offering a year of service for just $50. It seems things haven’t gone too well since then, because the company now appears to be dying rather quickly.
We’ve done some digging, and here’s everything we’ve been able to uncover.
What is Mobi?
First, we’ll briefly cover what Mobi is.
The company first began way back in 2005 as a local wireless carrier for the state of Hawaii. The original Mobi was backed by the same venture capital firm behind MetroPCS, which is now Metro by T-Mobile.
In the mid-2010s, Mobi signed an agreement with Verizon and Sprint to use their towers for coverage, and then just a few years back, in May of 2023, they partnered with T-Mobile to become a nationwide MVNO.
Finally, in late 2024, the company began a closed beta offering service on this new T-Mobile-based network. That then expanded to open beta in February of this year. Customers on this beta paid a one-time fee for a year of service.
You can find the full history lower down on the company’s (currently still available) website here.
This means Mobi customers consist of primarily two groups: the original Mobi customers on the Verizon network, and the new Mobi “beta” customers on the T-Mobile network.
So, what suggests they’re dying now? Quite a number of things.
Lines disconnecting
Multiple reports on Reddit say that lines are being completely disconnected with no communication from the company.
First reports are lines on the beta, which are the T-Mobile MVNO lines. One user says that their 3 lines died at midnight this past Sunday. Others are saying that their lines are going dead right as their renewal is up, with no option to renew.
Customers are theorizing that bills aren’t being paid over at Mobi, and that may have led to the agreement between Mobi and T-Mobile to end. We’ve reached out to T-Mobile to ask if they have any comment on this situation, and will report back if they do.
This also could affect legacy customers on the Verizon side of things.
Customer support is dead
The even bigger red flag is that pretty much every support method for Mobi is unusable.
Emails to their main support address, [email protected], are returned undeliverable. Phone calls to the main company line go nowhere. Texting their text-support number also receive no response.
The issue was progressively getting worse over the last week or so, according to users on Reddit. Apparently, calls once reached an automated message saying the number was disconnected, but now that number seems to just disconnect.
It’s not clear when the email address stopped working, but the earliest report we’ve found is around 9 days ago on this post in r/nocontract. Many key reports from users on Reddit have gone missing, as it seems the CEO of Mobi is the sole moderator of the r/mobi subreddit, and has been removing posts detailing the outage. Speaking of the CEO…
Lawsuit claims CEO has fled to Brazil
Probably the most fascinating tidbit we’ve found is a lawsuit filed in Delaware this past Monday by shareholders of Mobi against the CEO, Justen Burdette.
The lawsuit, summarized briefly here and quoted below, claims that Burdette fled to Brazil, stealing millions of dollars in wages and leaving employees and customers out in the cold. Apparently, Burdette’s actions locked employees out of critical systems, causing major issues.
The complaint, filed by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom on behalf of JB Mobile Holding and Pierre-Emmanuel Durand, takes aim at Justen Burdette for allegedly fleeing to Brazil and locking employees out of company systems, failing to fulfill a multimillion dollar purchase agreement, failing to pay $1 million in wages, terminating key executives without authorization and refusing to recognize his valid removal from management positions, leading to the loss of critical telecom contracts and disruption of customer cellular service.
Lawsuit summary
Clearly, this is a pretty strong indicator that future operations of the company are doubtful. If you’re still a customer of Mobi, you should absolutely begin the port-out process ASAP.
How to port out
Users online are already complaining that port-outs are taking a while. Indeed, a single user on the r/mobi subreddit appears to be a legitimate Mobi employee trying to help users out. Their latest post was 3 days ago, and they’ve been giving advice to customers on how to port out.
The user was claiming as recently as 9 days ago that the company is going through a rough patch, but “Is the ship sinking? I don’t think so.“
Either way, it’s definitely a good idea to port your number out of Mobi as soon as possible. Here are the steps to do that.
- Find your account number. One easy way to do this may be to find your original activation email, as the account number should be in that email.
- Figure out your PIN. If you don’t know it, you can use the last 6 digits of your ICCID, or SIM card number. On iPhone, go to Settings->General->About. On Android, you can dial *#06# and it will show you that number.
- Use this information, along with your phone number, to initiate a port with your new carrier.
As for Mobi, we’ve reached out to multiple possible sources of information, including T-Mobile, and we’ll be sure to update if we learn more.
It’s truly a shocking situation, and it’s a shame a company with such a long history appears to be collapsing in such a bad way.
