BEWARE: SPRINT   I made the mistake of looking to Sprint for a High Speed Internet Connection for the small business run out of my home office. The service I received wasn't even that great, but it's the billing and support issues that I feel everyone should know about. Below, you will find a greatly shortened version of my life dealing with Sprint. I signed up for a Sprint Broadband account that runs in the vicinity of $60-$80 per month. I signed up for a 2-year contract with them to lower the cost of installation and hardware fees, but still ended up paying a hefty price for the setup. For starters.. two months after I purchased their service, I got a call from them, with a complaint that my bill was past due. I never received a statement from them. They verified my address (which was wrong in their system) and said that they would get a copy of my statement sent to me. I waited, and waited. Two weeks later, I called them to find out where the statement was. Again, they showed the WRONG address in the system, and "updated" it again. Finally.. I got my first bill. Which, by now, was pretty outrageous and loaded with a few late fees, which they waived after I gave them a call. As I make all payments online through a billing service that is provided by Wells Fargo Bank, I immediately started sending monthly payments to Sprint. Nearly two dozen companies received and continue to receive payments from me each month with no problems at all. Sprint is the exception. Nearly every payment I sent to Sprint was either completely lost or credited to my Sprint Long Distance account rather than the Sprint Broadband account whos account number was put on the payment. One of the most memorable ones, was a payment for $300 (to help cover the setup fees), which was lost completely for several months. I called Sprint, they had no record of it. I called my bank and asked them to get ahold of Sprint to verify that the payments were sent and that Sprint had indeed received it. It was an electronic payment, so it got deducted out of my account immediately and went straight to Sprint - no chance of it getting lost in the mail, and no way for me to get my money back unless Sprint gave it to me. I spoke with at least two DOZEN people at Sprint, and spoke with people at different Sprint billing offices over a 2 month period reguarding the missing $300 payment, which was finally found. In the meantime, I had verified my information with the bank to supposedly ensure that Sprint would receive my next payment, and I sent out 2 more $100 payments to Sprint while waiting to find out about the missing $300 payment. The representative I had been keeping in close contact with about the missing payment knew it was to go to my now way overdue Sprint Broadband account. After nearly a month of waiting, I received my Sprint Long Distance statement with a nearly $300 credit on it. Rather irritated, I called Sprint. I was told that they were unable to transfer the funds to the Sprint Broadband account it was originally intended for. Instead, they chose to send me a refund check for the balance (it was $280-something.. the $300 minus what I owed for Long Distance that month). So, I waited to receive the refund check so that I could then take that money and pay it BACK TO SPRINT. But it got worse. The other two $100 payments I sent to Sprint also got lost, and again, I went through the process of contacting my bank, and contacting Sprint again and again to get the missing payments to the right place, or back in MY bank account where the money belonged. I had a Sprint representative speak *directly* with my bank to again ensure that the next payment would not get lost. At this point, I was losing a lot of patience, but I honestly figured that Sprint was a big enough company that they would be able to handle processing a little payment from me with no trouble. But that payment was lost as well. I called Sprint AGAIN, and was told by their staff that their Sprint Broadband billing center could not accept electronic payments. There was simply no way possible for them to do it. So WHY didn't they tell me that BEFORE?. Your guess is as good as mine. I have spent literally dozens of hours on the phone with Sprint, trying to figure out what payments they did receive, which ones they lost, and which ones they credited to the wrong account. The notes on my account often took a representative 15 minutes to read through before they could help me with the problem I had called about. And most of the time, they were more confused than *I* was as to what happened and how to fix it. I finally gave up. Though I had a contract with them, I was so frustrated by this point that I was willing to pay the $100-$200 to buy out the contract. I figured I'd owe them a few hundred dollars, I'd send them one CHECK via POSTAL MAIL that they would surely get, and I would never have to deal with them again. But boy was I wrong. I soon got a letter from Harvard Collections Agency. Even though Sprint and I both have logs of call after call after call showing that it was THEIR fault for payments getting lost or not credited to the proper account, they still decided to ruin my credit. I immediately called the Harvard collections agency. I don't know what time zone they are in, but I called them on a weekday afternoon, 3 PM MST, and I received no answer. I left them a message letting them know how many problems I had been having getting payments to Sprint, and also expressed my disgust at how they sent me to a collections agency when I had been making payments all along. In the meantime, I sent a $20 payment via check to Sprint to let them know I was planning on paying off the debt, but I wasn't about to pay much at this point. I still had a lot of hours to spend on the phone to research all of the payments I had made. Because honestly, I had no idea of how much money I had floating in thin air at this point. I had sent to many payments and so many of them got lost, and so many of them were credited to the wrong account, that I really had no idea. Later, I called Sprint to find out my final balance. I was told by a support representative, who again sounded more confused than I was, that my payment had been received by them and that they were showing a CREDIT on my account of $20. I assumed that Sprint cleared my debt when they sent it to the collections agency and asked what would happen with the credit on my account. I was told that if I paid of the balance in full, to Sprint, that they would clear the debt with the collections agency. I called Harvard Collections to find out the final balance on my account, so that I would know how much to pay. Again, no answer. Aren't these people supposed to be bugging me on the phone, instead of me trying to get ahold of them?. I left another message, telling them that they weren't going to receive a dime if they didn't get ahold of me. I never received a call back from them, and to this day, I have not.. Several weeks later, it was time to pay bills again. I knew I couldn't pay the full balance (which I was guessing was around $200-$300). So I decided to send a $100 payment to Sprint, since Harvard apparently had no interest in me. I knew that Sprint already had a credit on my account and figured that if I got that credit big enough to pay off the full balance, all would be okay. Several weeks more pass by, and again it's time to pay bills. I knew that I owed Sprint little enough that I could pay it off in full, so I gave them a call. Their support rep. told me that they were showing a $100.00 adjustment but that my account had a balance of $0. So what happened to the previous $20 credit that I had? And what happened to the $100? Did it all just disappear? The representative told me to call the Billing Center (wasn't SHE the billing center?) on the following Monday to ask them what happened, because she couldn't make any sense of it. I plan on calling the Billing Center, and I plan on recording all phone conversations from here on out.. here is where I'll post it to the world so everyone else will know as I do, that Sprints support does anything but. This is just a small summary of an issue I have had to deal with every month for the past 1 1/2 years and I have a feeling that it will last quite awhile. Alongside the frustration, excess late fees and bad credit they have left me with, Sprint has completely ripped me off and they are the very last company I would ever recommend to anyone, for anything. Having problems with Sprint as well? If you'd like to share your story, I'd be happy to host it here. Send full details to webmaster@codeink.com