Upgrade scam
hex20
Newbie

My wife and I have been Verizon Wireless customers for a long time and I've been looking for a good deal to get a 5G phone and THOUGHT I had found it when I was on the Verizon Wireless website yesterday.  They supposedly were going to give me an $800 trade in for my Note 9.  I was astonished at this but thought I'd check it out.  I answered all their questions, which DID NOT ask me upfront if my phone had a cracked screen.  So I went through the l-o-n-g laborious process to trade in my phone.  But every time I clicked the 'Continue' button, which looked like it was the last step before completing my purchase, I received an error message telling me there was some unspecified error and to retry my request after waiting a few minutes.  I lost track of how many times I did that, to no avail.  So I started a chat which, as you may have experienced, took another forever time.  But somebody FINALLY responded and I told her what was happening.  After I was randomly disconnected twice, it looked like it might work out.  On what appeared to be the absolute last step before completing the purchase, the system suddenly asked me if my phone had a cracked screen, which it does, and if I had been asked this BEFORE I went through the whole insanely long process, I sure as heck wouldn't have wasted at LEAST an hour of my time to get this far.  When I answered 'yes' to this question, my trade in value suddenly dropped from the advertised $800 to $300!!!  For a cracked screen, which, as I said before, had not been asked upfront???  If this wasn't a classic 'bait and switch', I don't know what is!  The woman on the chat actually asked me if I still wanted to complete the purchase!!!  Yeah sure - cause I just have an extra 500 bucks laying around!!!  Do people actually fall for this scam?  Not me.

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