Continued Sprint Fraud
I've been a sprint customer for ages. Their customer service is the worst I have ever experienced. Their walk-in stores are comprised of the least helpful and poorest trained people in the industry. That of course, is if you actually get to talk to a person in their walk-in stores before you get so frustrated at the long lines and the atmosphere of utter frustration. Their automated support lines will lead you in circles, hang up on you, and try their best to force you to give up before you get help. Want to try to get help over the web? Be prepared to give up more personal information than is required for a mortgage. You'll need a not just one, but a set of passwords that you couldn't possibly remember with any reasonable length of time between visits.Fortunately, I've managed to avoid communicating with sprint to any great extent over the years. As a customer, I've been trained to deal with problems unless and until I'm willing to deal with sprint employees, sprint business processes, and sprint support.
The last time I was forced to communicate with them, I wanted a new phone and had been looking around at non-sprint options. I wanted simply to verify that my contract had expired - as it should have. During my previous phone purchase, I made sure to avoid extending my contract and had refused discounts to do so. I did that because I discovered during the prior phone upgrade that sprint had extended my contract without informing me. I was shocked to find out that sprint extended my contract, and their basis for doing so was from an unsolicited phone call to sign me up for paid services that were already included in my ancient plan.
At that point, I was livid. I spent days going from sprint store to sprint store (supposedly, some sprint stores are able to handle certain kinds of problems while others cannot) and calling customer service to get the issue rectified. In the end, sprint refused to remove the 2 year extension - not because they didn't agree that it was fraudulent (they did!), but because... actually they gave me two reasons:
- I did not detect the fraud within 6 months of the event, which I did, so they followed up with
- The fraud occurred during the previous calendar year
Un-stinking-believable. In the end, the frustration coupled with the fact that leaving sprint would also mean my wife would leave sprint which would mean two phone purchases, two hotly disputed contracts that would end up having to be paid or in collections before we could see any recourse, and a set of phone number portability issues as yet to be determined.
In the end, I upgraded to a new phone and placed my wife in a new family plan on my account. We agreed with sprint that my wifes contract would not be extended, as placing her on my account was to alleviate several other problems associated with sprint fraud and sprint business process failures not relevant to this discussion.
Once the change was made, I called to verify our expiration dates. I checked our expiration dates online. I called again a month later to make sure no changes were made. I asked for a notation on the account that no contract extensions were to be made.
So here we are - just about two years later. I go into the sprint website - and although it recognizes my username and password - they've made a site update so I have to go through the process again of creating an all new account. Of course my username isn't available - it's already taken. By me. After trying to create an account three times over the course of a week, I finally get in and what do I see? My wife's account has an expiration date in 2009. We've made zero changes, purchased zero new equipment, asked for zero additional services since the last incident.
So of course, I decided that I don't have the patience within me to deal with sprint and I take a week to enjoy life before I get sent back through their torture system. Today, I did a bit of googling. I'm not alone, there are over 500,000 results for sprint fraud in google. 630,000 for sprint fraudulent. Sprint complaint gets 369,000 results. Sprint fraud contract extension gets 23,700 results. And these are just the people who got frustrated enough to put up a web page. I've been dealing with the problem for years and I haven't been motivated until now.
Achieving a Resolution
I called sprint today. I actually got through to a person. She tried to explain to me several reasons for my contract extension and I logically parried away all of them. In the end, she negotiated a contract extension - still fraudulent, still way beyond the expiration date given from my last sprint encounter - that coincides roughly with my own planned sprint exodus. Of course - she won't give me any documentation of our conversation today. No fax, no email, no letter. And she did indicate that sprint will actually show the 2009 expiration date on my account. The only thing she was capable of doing, with the help of a supervisor, was to place a high priority note on the account stating the new expiration date. I'll call tomorrow to see if it's officially there.I don't know if it had an affect, but in countering their refusal to remove the expiration today, I promised to sue in small claims, complain to the FCC, complain to the attorney general, submit my experience to any and all consumer websites that I can, complain to the SEC, and I also promised to call every day using my sprint phone and take up all of their time all day long until the issue was resolved. Kind of rough for a first call on a problem, but given my past experience (of which this is only a small subset), it was called for. That and I did have every intention of following up on those promises during my call with them today.
I do find it amusing that they commit fraud, get caught committing fraud, admit to committing fraud, and then negotiate a settlement that you can't trust but simply hope is somehow less painful than their original action. It's like if I broke into your house, stole a hundred dollars, you caught me, I admitted it, refused to return it, and after allowing you pester me for a week about it I agreed to send you a check for ten dollars to get you to leave me alone - but I wouldn't tell you when I would send the check. It's not really a resolution. It's something, but it's not a resolution.
Sprint Fraudulently Extending Contracts Commentary
