T-Mobile Germany expiration date?
 

I'm visiting Germany this week for the first time in almost a year. I went and bought a 30€ refill card and in passing asked the seller to confirm the account will be good for another year when I refill. She told me T-Mobile prepaids now have no expiration date as long as there are some € left. I couldn't find anything in the discussions here, and my German isn't good enough to figure it out from the T-Mobile Germany web site. Is this true that there is now no expiration for T-Mobile Germany prepaid cards?

Yes, it is true. A recent court decision essentially stopped the practice of allowing credit to expire. The major providers no longer give specific expiration dates to accounts that are in credit. However, it's a good idea to keep a minimal amount of activity on the phone (send a text message every now and then) and make sure credit doesn't drop to zero or close to it.

The court decisions applied only to some operators, T-Mobile was not among them. However T-Mobile decided it'd be better to elimate expiration dates voluntarily (before being sentenced to do so).
Some provider cards (i.e. from Debitel, Mobilcom, Talkline, Phone House &c.) might still expire though this will probably change within a few weeks too.

Yes, I oversimplified my answer a little; Debitel, for example, still retains the expiration dates (I had a Debitel Vodafone Compact card that was still only valid for 92 days per recharge). However, the major four operators, and several others (Blau, simyo) have eliminated the expiration date, as the ruling, which was limited in scope, wold almost certainly be applied to them as well if anyone decided to sue. AFAIK O2 was a holdout for a little while, instead promising to return users' money once the expiration date had elapsed, but they then changed their minds.

May i add that Simyo and Blau cards still expire if you dont recharge them. It is not shown on the balance check SMS anymore but the expiry date is available if you dial the voice menu. You can re-activate them later on but in some reported cases the credit was zero then and could only redeemned by get it transferred to a bank account.
Vodafone made a new deal recently. They will cancel your "contract" for the prepaid card if you dont use or recharge it within 14 months. This can be found on a article on teltarif.de - i didnt find the link right now, sorry.

Yes, if the account hits zero credit (or within an "administrative fee" of it, in the case of O2, I believe this was 2.50), there's obviously no credit left to refund and so the ruling doesn't apply.

Thanks for the info about Simyo, dg7feq -- I just called the voice menu, and sure enough, my account "expires" in 10 months (9 March 2008 ). I'll keep using the card and call it up in a few days to see whether the date has changed. It could be a "rolling" date based on account activity, not on last recharge. Hmmm.

Its unfortunately not rolling... I talked with Simyo some days ago cause we have a lot of these cards in the company. They lenghten the validity by 6 months with each recharge, max. is 12 months. As it had been before. Only change is that you can redeem the money that was still on the card when it expired.