Buy a device that failed the financial eligibility check?

Michael Goldstein • February 19, 2015

UPDATE: This offer was intended as a stop-gap to help people that found themselves on the wrong side of the Sprint financial eligibility date (FED) check, despite getting prior assurances that their phone would work on Ting. It was a time-sensitive issue and its time has passed. We’ll keep this blog post around for posterity (and to preserve the massive comment thread that accompanies it), though the offer has long since expired.



The people who are most blatantly wronged by this sudden change to our compatibility check this week are those that spent money on a phone that was seemingly Ting-ready and are now unable to use it. We don’t know whether those phones will become eligible in the near future so we want to at least make you whole financially and get you started with us as soon as possible.

To that end, we have set up a process to collect that device from you and give you a service credit equal to the value of that purchase. Here is what will be involved.

You submit to us:

– An ESN for a Sprint device that is failing.

– A purchase receipt for that device from a third party like eBay or Glyde (not Sprint) dated between January 1, 2015 and February 15, 2015 (when the new eligibility check was launched).

We email you a FedEx slip to send us the device free of charge.

We also send you a GSM SIM card and beta invite if you choose to buy something in that direction.

You send us the device.

Once we receive that device and confirm that it matches what you submitted, we apply a service credit to your account equal to the price you paid for that device, including shipping and taxes.

This is intended to afford you a comparable replacement device or subsidize something better. Certainly a new, unlocked GSM device is the simplest thing you can buy. If you buy something used, please, please do not buy anything, Sprint or GSM, until you have checked the ESN/IMEI/MEID with our compatibility checker.

To be clear, this offer does not apply to:

– Unlocked iPhone 6/6+ or Nexus 5/6. We have a manual process to get these activated on Sprint. Call us. We can also send you a GSM SIM card and beta invite to activate them on GSM.

– People who have a device from Sprint. You need to resolve your financial status with Sprint and we will do everything we can to help you with that.

Again, we acknowledge that this only addresses the most wronged here. We will continue to work on helping those of you who believe yourselves to be in good standing with Sprint directly and we will continue to work on the success rate of third-party devices coming to Ting in the future.

We hope this helps and that it gets many of you having a positive Ting experience soon.