by Jamy » Sat Feb 26, 2011 1:49 pm
Liv's post about that guy suing Wells Fargo reminded me of my own insurance scam I'm dealing with here. It's Asurion, an insurance company that "insures" cell phones. My son accidentally put my cell phone through the wash when he decided to do me a favor and wash my coat with the laundry. No problem...it was insured....or so I thought. Come to find out that in addition to all that I'd already paid for the insurance, I was also going to have to pay $40. Not only that, but the phone replacement option they gave me was completely unacceptable. I called them and was told that was T-mobile's problem. I called T-mobile and told me that was an Asurion issue.
This whole time, everyone I talked to at T-mobile and Asurion treated me as if I was being unreasonable for wanting to have more say in the phone that I'm to be using for the next year or longer. It took me a month to pick out the phone that I had because I'm a careful shopper and I loved my phone. The piece of crap they tried to shove on me wasn't anything like my phone and had all kinds of bad reviews online, but when I pointed this out, they were dismissive.
Nobody helped me and the best Asurion would do was keep parroting "This phone has all the same features as your old phone." Well actually, it didn't and I pointed this out too, but they still wouldn't offer me anything else. This went on for almost a week until I finally sent them an email and said that I was going to file a complaint with the lawyer who was conducting the class action lawsuit against them for just this sort of thing. The NEXT DAY I got a phone call from some secretary in the CEO's office (so she said). She said that if I could go to a cell phone store and buy my original phone, they would replace it, but when I tried, I learned it was discontinued.
I still don't have a cell phone and this was almost two months ago. The moral of the story is DON'T INSURE YOUR PHONE. I'm so pissed off about the whole thing that I told my husband not to re-up my contract with T-mobile when it runs out. I'll take my chances with some other provider.
I hate Asurion and I hope that lawyer bleeds them dry.