Hack Sprint For Dropped Call Credit
This sounds like a nifty HowTo on getting Sprint to give you a few extra bucks off your cellphone bill.
1. Call Sprint - 1-800-877-4646
2. Obey the opening instructions.
3. When the system asks, "How may I help you?," say "dropped call." The voice should confirm by saying, "Okay dropped call."
4. Revel in the extra 50 cents or so Sprint gives you.
50 CENTS? Well, that's for every time you say, "dropped call" until a rep comes on the phone. WikiHow users report an average savings of $11.00. If you abuse it, however, you get nothing, so spank Sprint with prudence.
We can't test it out ourselves, so report your success and failures in the comments.
This is a test using rich text formatting and html links. It's the generic "company" ad that should appear on all posts with the Company category if they don't have an ad attached to a specific company.
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Comments:
Slightly off topic, but last night I tried the "activation fee? can you wave that for me?" trick I read here last week. I called Cingular to my move now wife's contract to my service, they wanted to charge me a $18 line transfer fee. I simply said "can you waive that?" and at first they offered 1/2 off (which I accepted), but then there were a couple delays processing it so they waived the whole thing!
Not bad, consumerist, you saved me $18. I'll drink to that.
They have to know how to credit you that 50c, though, so you must have to give your Sprint phone number or account number first. So what this comes down to is identifying yourself honestly and *then* abusing the system? That seems... shortsighted, somehow.
Well...it's nice to know that there is at least some recourse for getting a dropped call on Sprint...I wonder if Verizon has a similar plan...
Mendel, that falls under number 2. How elese are they supposed to credit your account if you don't tell them what your account is?
wow, encouraging fraud. that's swell.
This works most easily by calling *2 from your phone, so there's no need to explicitly identify yourself. The limit is 4 credits per call, 20 credits per month. This limit is per line, so if you have multiple lines then you can save $10 x number of lines off your bill each month.
I love how our snarky dog-eat-dog crop of newish commenters automatically assumes that our readers will flagrantly abuse this knowledge. You know what they say about a thief always thinking people are stealing from hir, right?
I'm with Mary Marsala. Some of the new commenters don't seem to get the point/concept of Consumerist.
Update: Actually, billhelm has been around for a while. Most of his comments are in the same vein.
The point that was being made was that nowhere in the post does it say to do this after a dropped call. It just says "All you need to do is X and they'll give you free money!" It really, really does sound like it's encouraging people to sap it for all it's worth, despite the Consumerist's intentions.
I don't think it is wrong to publish this as most folks don't immediately call back when a call is dropped.
Anyone know if T-mobile's has an automatic dropped call credit system also? Their bills have description codes for "credits due to dropped calls".
I get the point/concept of consumerist, I just don't outright support ripping off companies using loopholes which are bound to be closed anyway - making it more difficult for people with legitmately dropped calls to get credit.
There's plenty of ways to get discounts with Sprint (especially if you've been a long term customer) besides exploiting some stupid automated phone credit. Like writing to their customer service.
See:
http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=93252&hi...
for hundreds of examples of where this paid off. Consumerist would be better off showing these sorts of legitimate paths to discounts rather than stuff that falls into a dubious gray area.
The issue is is that it was posted as a "hack".
Time for something else of Sprint's services to be abused by morons each month.