Cell Phone Rebates an Ongoing Problem
This coming week I will have waited more than 200 days (more than six months) for my $100 Motorola Droid rebate from Verizon. I bought this phone in late December 2009, and submitted the rebate request on January 10, 2010. Verizon acknowledges that they received the rebate request, but they have not managed to send me a usable rebate yet. I did receive a rebate money card from them, but this card could not be redeemed because I received the card after Verizon had canceled it as a nonreceived money card. The replacement card, promised to me about three weeks ago, has yet to show up.
Tue, August 03, 2010
PC World — This coming week I will have waited more than 200 days (more than six months) for my $100 Motorola (MOT) Droid rebate from Verizon (VZ). I bought this phone in late December 2009, and submitted the rebate request on January 10, 2010. Verizon acknowledges that they received the rebate request, but they have not managed to send me a usable rebate yet. I did receive a rebate money card from them, but this card could not be redeemed because I received the card after Verizon had canceled it as a nonreceived money card. The replacement card, promised to me about three weeks ago, has yet to show up.
After spending more than 5 hours chasing this rebate, I find I need to set up a Website about this issue and make a blog post about it here on PCWorld.
Slideshow: 12 Types of Cell Phone Users That Drive Us Nuts
Is the problem I encountered a widespread one, you might wonder? I work in the public computer center of a public library and talk with hundreds of people every week. So I conducted an informal poll, and guess what? Pretty often people do not receive their cell-phone rebates, whether the rebates come from Verizon, T-Mobile, or any of the other cell-phone companies. Several people in the local Android users group here in the Washington, D.C., area confirmed that they had not received cell-phone rebates from Verizon, too.
So the question becomes, what is the public going to do about these rebate scams? The time has come for all consumer product rebates to be registered with the government so that a degree of transparency can occur. Consumers need to be able to quickly and easily determine two stats for a particular rebate:
What percentage of purchasers successfully submitted the rebate? What percentage of submitted rebates were cashed (redeemed)?
If either of these statistics appear unusually low, then consumers can intelligently choose to avoid making a purchase of that rebated product. For sweet justice to occur, the stats for any consumer rebate could easily be checked with a cell phone app – or by asking any sales agent selling a rebated product – “What are the stats for this rebate?”
And our federal government, the people who are supposed to be monitoring rebate scams, needs to outlaw rebate money cards. Those rebate money cards can too easily be intercepted by third parties – or even diverted by people whose job is to handle the cards. Send me my rebate as a check. That's the only way I want to see it.
