Complaint Review: Assurance Wireless - Nationwide

 My Assurance Wireless cell phone (aka Obama phone) that i recieved through the state is paid for by tax payers dollars. The intent of this "free" cell phone is to help indigent people find work by contacting employers , help people with medical issues contact doctors and make appointments, basically to help people who do not have or cant afford a cell phone better their lives. That is all great and wonderful but i now question the integrity of this program since i have had some major hardware issues making my phone unusable and unreliable and cannot get any help what so ever from Assurance Wireless. Im not sure who is actually paying the bill for these phones but im sure somebody (the tax payer) is and somebody is making ALOT of money. So if the phone doesnt work you would think that the government paying the bill would care, or the company that is receiving the money would care. But that is not the case at all.

Assurance Wireless customer service department is based out of India where the employees know absolutely nothing more than what is displayed on the web page. I called countless times. It took four calls before i was able to speak to someone who spoke English well enough to understand and properly communicate with. But again this person responded to my questions by reciting sentences on the web page. If you ask to speak to a manager they either pretend to transfer you and hang up on you or they become personally offended that their recited answer to your question was not good enough. The customer service representative actually told me that i should be happy with the services that do work since im getting a free phone. I tried to explain to him that its not free. That our government is paying the bill, and our government is paying per phone on a vast scale. Basically anyone in the US who is low income or receiving any type of government assistance (like unemployment, food stamps, GA, SSI, SDI, etc) can get one of these phones.

It appears to me that the only thing anybody related to this phone service cares about is getting you to sign up. Their are Assurance Wireless reps posted up outside of social service buildings, city hall, court houses, addiction treatment centers, methadone clinics, etc. all of which are pushing to get you to sign up. Once you are signed up, that is the end of it. You recieve a phone in the mail with activation instructions. All customer service from that point foward is useless or nonexistent. The service plan advertises unlimited text messages however if you read a single message, you must reboot the phone to read another. The service plan includes 250 free minutes a month and they have a million ways to purchase additional minutes. Myself and many others have reported minutes missing from our accounts. Calls rarely connect (or stay connected for more than a few minutes) which defeats the whole point of this program.

Good luck talking to that new employer during a phone interview... Anyway i believe this is a fantastic scam. I do give the inventors credit because they have all the angles covered. Assurance Wireless is pushing these phones to EVERYONE!!! They are getting paid gaurenteed funds directly by the government for the hardware and service agreement for millions of phones. The phones work well enough that the company wont send us working devices but they have ingenious ways of limiting our usage. You cannot get your problems resolved or even talk to someone about your technical problems. You cannot get a working device. So i cant use it, and since im not paying for the phone or service why would i cancel it? I was angry and did not want Assurance Wireless getting anymore from the government so i actually called to cancel and three calls and 25 minutes later i gave up. This is a perfect scam. Impossible to prove, foreign point of contact, US based gaurenteed government funds, minimal complaints from customers because its not coming out of our pocket, impossible to cancel, etc. I even applied for a new phone using my real information and a slightly different address. I recieved another brand new phone with a brand new number that worked perfect for about 2 weeks until it started doing the exact same thing as my first phone, the exact same problem as several of my friends phones. So now they are getting twice the money from whom ever is paying the bill. Oh yeah, i forgot to mention that since i recieved my second phone my original phone has been sitting in a box completely shut off. I got 250 minutes posted to that account on September 2nd and i have used 124 minutes so far. However my phone was never removed from that box or even turned on during that period of time.