Cricket wireless, great prices, old phones, bad customer service and reused phone numbers from crack dealers...
My girlfriend comes from a very large family and so she loves to spend hours on the phone. So my only choices are to get unlimited calling from one of the major carriers like AT&T or Verizon at a cost of over $100 a month or to get Cricket wireless for around $40 a month. So to save money I went with Cricket. So I went online and looked through their different phones, packages and plans and decided that for my girlfriend the $30 a month package would be all she needed.
For $40 a month they add unlimited texting and for $50 a month they add unlimited web. She never uses the web and has no idea how to text so I made the decision to go with the $30 a month base package.
Then you have to choose your cell phone. You can’t use your own cell phone and you can go one by one and just use it with the Cricket service. Unlike the cell phones that most carriers use with SIMM cards which you can easily just swap from one phone to another, the Cricket phones do not use SIMM cards. Yes there are some folks on eBay and other online resources trying to sell supposedly unlocked cell phones that you can use with Cricket.
Before you purchase and use these you need to talk to your local cricket office and they’ll explain to you that they probably will not work unless they were originally a cricket phone and then they must also be from your area because there are different technologies and bandwidths used in different market areas. Some areas like near to city are tri-band and many others are not. So I try band phone from your city will not work in a non-tri-band area.
So buying a online phone that supposedly works the cricket is basically gambling and the odds are it won’t work. The seller will not take the phone back and you be left with a phone that doesn’t work. So you have to stick with the ones they offer and generally speaking the majority of phones Cricket offers are the same ones the major carriers offered 3 to 5 years ago. So if you’re going go with Cricket you have to be okay with an ancient phone. You won’t see any I’ve phones, evo’s or androids on Cricket.
So, once you get beyond that and you get set up for your phone – oh by the way we had to call an 800 number to activate her phone. No one at this number knew how to speak English. I had to keep calling back and finally got someone that spoke broken English and was absolutely useless. So I had to spend some time reading through all the manuals and find a way around this. They need to hire some English-speaking individuals at Cricket for customer service as this is America and we do speak English here.
Anyways we got the phone to work and everything was fine until about a few days later. Throughout the day there would be three or four phone calls from some shady character that was looking apparently to buy drugs. Then there were some other people calling for the same. After a while we figured out that apparently cricket does not give you clean, new phone numbers. When someone doesn’t pay on it and they revoke their phone number for whatever reason they just turn around and give it to a new customer. That’s exactly what happened to us and so micro friend gets phone calls throughout the day and even in the middle of night of people looking for illegal substances.
So, if you can get past the old outdated cell phones, the non-English speaking and only Spanish-speaking customer service reps, and the regurgitated phone numbers from crack dealers then Cricket is a good, solid cell phone service with prices that are half of that of the other carriers. For now, we will stick with Cricket and I think it’s hilarious, but micro friend doesn’t like the idea of crackheads calling her for drugs, but she knows all she has to do is if she doesn’t recognize the phone number just don’t pick it up and send it to voicemail. And that’s what she’s doing now.
I have a Cricket phone and haven’t had any weird phone calls from crack dealers or crack heads, but I do get phone calls and messages in Spanish from people I have no idea who they are quite often. Apparently this phone or phone number was originally owned by someone from Mexico. And their relatives or friends are still calling the same number. If I knew Spanish I would tell them that this is the wrong number and that they can’t reach that person here any more, but I don’t know any Spanish so I just don’t answer the phone if I don’t know the number thats dialing me. Usually I get about three or four of these per day everyday. It’s a little annoying, but I guess for the price Cricket charges I can put up with it and it is not a big deal.
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Cricket sucks. I signed up for the automatic plan so there wouldn’t be the issues usually attributed to Cricket with billing and due dates. Yet they somehow still suspended my account every month even though the monthly charges were deducted from my credit card – they are absolute morons at Cricket. Terrible customer service. I definitely do not recommend their cellular service.
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I have never had a cricket phone or even done business with them, but they seem to be calling me several times every day! I see this number on my phone ID – 1(800)234-2265 and I found by researching that number that it is indeed Cricket and their telemarketing staff. Isn’t that illegal as I am on the do not call list!
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