The most recent blur around these here interwebs is that Sprint cut off legitimate paying customers because, well, they stopped legitimately paying.

Consumerist had a conversation with a Sprint insider and here’s what he/she had to say about the issue:

CONSUMERIST: How frequently did someone have to call to get terminated for calling customer service too much?

SPRINT INSIDER: 90 times in a 6 month period was the standard I think.

CONSUMERIST: Were they calling about the same service problem?

SPRINT INSIDER: These were the customers that had nothing to do but call us every single day demanding credit. And they were getting it because customer care was getting exhausted from arguing with them. So a nickel at a time these customers were collecting literally thousands of dollars in credit balances.

We were targeting people that were just outright defrauding the company. These customers will probably eventually force their future service providers to take similar action if they do not change their ways.

CONSUMERIST: One reader said he got canceled because he kept calling you because you were charging him for text messages he shouldn’t have been charged for.

SPRINT INSIDER: I can’t really get into specifics on an account, BUT… I will re-direct to what I mentioned earlier…These customers were for the most part literally defrauding our company. Not just a courtesy credit or two… We’re talking customers that haven’t made a payment since 2005 and still have active service. Customers who were getting better deals than our own employees get for their own personal accounts. These weren’t the customer care horror stories we’ve heard where a billing issue drags on for 8 months. This was just unrealistic amounts of credits and at the end of the year we were LITERALLY paying these customers to use our service.

Sorry, but that’s just wrong. I have two things to add to this.

1. Last summer, during my AOL-induced fame, many people told me I should’ve just kept taking their retention offers time and time again to get free service, so I’m sure this was happening in some if not all of the cases of Sprint terminating customers.

2. A long time ago, I was a frequenter of alt.cellular.sprintpcs and this was going on quite regularly. I railed against it then, and I still think it’s wrong today. Here’s what I posted way back on January 27th of 2002…

I’m not saying Sprint should not have retention deals, but all of a sudden I notice everyone is “cancelling” or at least saying they are to get a better deal out of Sprint PCS. People bitch about service and cost, and everything else, but they spend tons of time trying to “beat the man.” It’s a little disheartening, at best, to see this going on in the scale it’s going on at in the group.

Why?

Well, frankly, if everyone is wondering why plan prices are up, but features are being trimmed (FIMF, 8pm nights) just look at how much Sprint’s shelling out for retention groupies who weren’t cancelling anyway! One guy on this group said in the same message he was unhappy with the call capacity issues, and took a retention deal for another 150 minutes added to his plan! Are you kidding me?

I’m not the moral police, but it’s people like this who make people who pay their bill every month and do things the right way have to pay more for no real reason. It would probably be in Sprint’s best interest to do what they did to me. Let me cancel and disappear. 8 months down the road, they sent me a post card to come back and made a great deal as far as rebates went so I took it. I was really cancelling, at least, and they got me back with a retention style deal. If Sprint PCS just told all these “potential cancellers” to fuck off and cancel anyway, I’m sure most of them would change their mind.

Just my two cents
Your results may vary.

I’d bet quite a bit of cashola that most of the people who got cut off, seeing as this is what the “insider” claims, were doing similar style deals. If you want to see why I believe this was happening, just read the responses in that thread. I was ripped into numerous times and saw numerous specious explanations, justifications, and rationalizations.

I hope they were all in the lot of people who got their comeuppance.