In response to our post on Saving A Wet Cellphone, and specifically the advice we for some reason gave about trying to trick companies to pay for dropping the blasted phone in the sink by taping over the water damage sticker, an anonymous tipster wrote:

Most people don’t realize that nearly all of the phones that carriers sell today have MULTIPLE liquid damage indicators, and only one is generally visible (under the battery, natch). It’s generally true that if the one under the battery is triggered, then odds are very high that the ones inside are triggered as well.

By taping over the thing, or by outright lying, this only results in a delay of the customer being charged a voided-warranty fee, and then tends to result in said customer returning and bitching about a ‘mystery charge’ they forgot they agreed to accept as a condition of a warranty exchange. Most sales reps aren’t going to try to intentionally fuck you by lying about the damage indicator, its just generally easier to break it to you then, and they tend to know when a customer will be charged for something and when you can sneak a ‘warranty issue’ by the techs (user damages mostly..).

Sometimes, it’s just better to accept the hand that fate has dealt you, learn your lesson, and fess to the damage and buy a new phone (extend your contract or don’t, you’ve got a choice, its up to you to accept the discount a contract provides) versus trying to scam the carriers.

Yes, honesty is the best policy. Just because companies lie to us doesn’t mean we should start lying to them. Plus, they’re sneaky bastards… they usually know.

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