Let me tell a tale regarding the insurance... I bought the insurance on my last phone, a Vibrant, and will never, ever buy it again.
About 6 months into having my Vibrant, I get a text one day saying something to the effect of: "please return the damaged hardware in order to avoid charges on your phone bill." I call T-mobile and tell them about the text, they say they don't know about the text (turns out they were correct - Asurion sends out the texts), and assure me that it was probably a mistake and that should be the end of it. Two months later, I open up my T-mobile bill and there are TWO charges for 275.00 a piece. This begins a nightmare of epic proportions. Some low life scum had somehow gotten my insurance info and had managed to file two claims on my insurance and had in essence purchased 2 Vibrants for 125 bucks a piece. After literally HOURS on the phone with both T-mobile and Asurion, I finally managed to get the charges wiped and things cleared up, but not before T-mobile threatened to send the outstanding charges to creditors. I thought the story was over - I even used the insurance to replace my Vibrant that had fallen on the pavement and shattered the screen.
Then, about 6 months later, it happened again. And not just once, but FOUR times. I begged and pleaded with Asurion to set some sort of alert on my account so that any new claims would be verified with me (btw it is incredibly easy to make a false claim against the insurance with basic account information. The kicker is that you can have the replacement phone shipped to ANY address simply by using the online claim form) after the first of the four false claims. They said there was nothing they could do. With each new claim, I had to spend hours on the phone. This was made doubly frustrating by the fact that I had indeed made the only legitimate claim against the insurance. Because T-mobile and Asurion are two completely separate companies, I got minimal cooperation to occur between the two. I will say that T-mobile was always patient and understanding throughout, but I think that had largely to do with the fact that I have been a Powertel/T-mobile customer since the mid-90s.
By the time I actually used the insurance, I was only saving 100 bucks off what a Vibrant would have cost me on Craigslist. I would have gladly paid 100 bucks to make all that trouble and frustration go away. Never again.
