Complaint Review: Sprint Wireless

From day 2, I have had problems with Sprint, both at my local store and via corporate. We entered Sprint to get 2 tablets with unlimited data as we do not have internet at home. We inquired about the price, and the salesperson told us $25/month line fee per tablet plus the price of the tablet (we chose to lease the tablets from them). We agreed to this pricing, got our new tablets, and left the store. The next day I got an email saying we had changes to our account and the cost would actually be $50/month per tablet plus tablet cost.

When I went back to the store to talk to the manager about it he claimed that we had to have a phone line on the account in order to qualify for the $25/month. It took a lot of back and forth between me and an employee there before the manager finally came out to talk to me and told me there was nothing he could do, but by adding a phone to the account our bill would go down to approximately $98/month. We agreed, and got the cheapest phone available because we did not need the phone as we had Verizon for phone plans (at the time they did not offer unlimited data or we would have gone there). 

I get the first bill, and it is over $150! I go to the store that we purchased everything at, and he told me I had to go to a corporate store because as a contracter (In Touch Wireless) they were not able to alter bills. I go to a corporate store, and they send me BACK to the store I purchased the products from claiming because they made the promise of the bill they had to be the ones to honor it. I tried explaining to him that they sent me here, and he just gave me a phone number to customer service. I called the number, and got stuck in an automated loop before the system hung up on me! I could not get to a person to save my life!

I returned to my original store and demanded we speak to the district manager. The employee there was very understanding of our frustration and told us he will give the DM our contact info. We told him if we did not hear back in 24 hours or less we would be returning the devices and ending our relationship with Sprint. 48 hours pass, and no call comes. We go back to the store and express our frustration with the entire situation and the employee told us we could just return the devices and they would cancel our plan and we would be free to go, however we would not be refunded any of the money that we had paid (2 billing cycles worth) and we accepted that. 

Fast forward a few months, and I see a collections filed against me for over $1300!!! When I contact Sprint customer service via chat, they tell me that they have no record that the devices were returned and once I got proof of that, they could go from there. I contacted the store, and they had no record of us returning the devices. She took our word for it, because they had gone through multiple manager changes as well as company change so it is possible it got lost. She put a note in our account that the devices were returned so I contacted Sprint via chat again.

This time, they claimed that the charges were for terminating the lease before the 2 years was up and it was the remaining balance due on the tablets. I informed the customer support that we returned the tablets based on the employees telling us that we would be free to go and turning in the tablets allowed us to terminate our contract. At this point, we have spoken to NUMEROUS employees both online and in store and no one seems to help.

I spoke to them again last week about this issue, which has now been going on for over a year. They are still saying there is nothing they can do about the charges because they are from terminating the lease early. Ask yourself this: if we were ever informed that we would have to pay the remaining balance on the tablets, would we have turned them in?? No we would not! I refuse to pay for something that we do not own. In my last chat with sprint, which did not go well, they said that they were escalating my case and that I would get a call within 24 hours from a supervisor. They refused to give me a number to call other than the automated one so this was the best option I could get was to wait for their call. Guess what never came?? Yep, they never called me and it has been over 5 days since I was told they would. 

Sprint is full of people that do not care about their customers. Constantly offering false promises that apparently they can never fulfill, from billing to terminating contracts. I will NEVER recommend Sprint to anyone, for anything. They are a terrible company with terrible customer service.