My Samsung Galaxy S5 had a usb charging port problem after 18 months. I had gotten a SquareTrade policy when I bought the phone, since they are half the price of At&t’s protection plan.
I did NOT have enough battery power to do a factory reset, so I sent the phone in minus the SD Card. HUGE Mistake. A mere week had gone by after I sent the phone in for repair, and oh! What’s this? A charge from Microsoft Xbox on my account? I have never owned an Xbox, let alone opened an account. I called Microsoft Xbox at (800) 469-8269 and said, “Umm, I never bought an Xbox, what’s going on? They had opened an account using my gmail spam email account@outlook.com, that day. Sure enough, my credit card was linked to this account. They removed the credit card, but could NOT say what the charge was for….hmmm.
I called my bank, and cancelled the my credit card. Oh but wait. There were more surprises in store.
They tried to change my Facebook password. Twice. But since I have dual layer authentication (something you have, plus something you know. Like an atm card and a pin.)
And I permanently lost about 6 weeks of emails from my regular gmail account.
But the fun was not over yet. When they returned the phone, it had been factory reset.
Then, I started getting a Sim Card Error. We traipsed lazily into the At&t store, and got a new Sim card. Nope. I still had no service. So we put a friend’s Sim Card in my phone. Nope, not going to happen. We put my Sim card into their phone and it worked as advertised. So the phone has a bad Sim Card Reader. Nice.
Round 2 of dealing with SquareTrade. I spoke to their “offshore” tech support person, and he said that someone would be calling me in 20 minutes (on another line.) Sure enough about 1/2 hour later, the phone rang, and this time it was good old American based tech support.
I explained the issue (again). Since the failure occurred less than 30 days after repair, this was covered. So my phone went to Los Angeles (via Memphis) a second time. I am still waiting.
Lesson learned. If you are going to send your cell phone in for repair, doesn’t matter if it’s SquareTrade, or someplace else. Save yourself some grief, do screen shots of your screens, save them to the micro sd card (or email them to yourself), and nuke that phone (factory reset) before it leaves your hands for repair, if at all possible. I could have gone to Batteries Plus and gotten a 2nd battery and done the wipe before shipping. But hey, I now have 2 batteries.
Enjoy my technological impairment!
Wayno