And They're Off...

The v3i's are on their way back.

Turns out that evil, clueless, stupid Wirefly doesn't do exchanges on broken merchandise. You get two choices... one - send the Razr to Motorola for repair... two - cancel the entire order with Wirefly: send the phones back, cancel the contract with Cingular. (And they added "And then place a new order.")

Place a new order indeed. Turns out that I made a mistake (sort of) in the first place. But it's entirely understandable. I don't like how Amazon also lists other people's products co-mingled with their own. Had I known the phones were available from Amazon directly and from Wirefly, I would have definitely gone directly to Amazon.

And browsing around their site, I was able to get it to show up with both Amazon and Wirefly (and Wirefly was more prominent) as well as showing only Wirefly - no mention of Amazon.

So, the phones are slowly trudging their way back to Maryland on FedEx Ground. And a new order's been placed with Amazon. Of course, they're out of stock with Amazon. So we could be without cell phones for as much as a month.

Seriously, though, what is Amazon.com doing working with a company as awful as Inphonic aka Wirefly? They were actually kicked out of the Better Business Bureau, I've now found. As of today, they have 2,187 complaints in the last 12 months (3,472 complaints in the past 36 months).

Do a search on "Wirefly Sucks" on Google to find all kinds of stuff about this company.

Anywhere you see the "Powered by InPhonic" you should know you're in trouble... they've got a boiler room in India full of people with accents so thick you can't understand them doing their best to separate you from your money at any and all costs. I used to believe they were just merely incompetent or that their phone jockeys were just poorly trained, but I'm now convinced the whole point of InPhonic/Wirefly/etc. is just to rip you off. They're nothing but a bunch of crooks.

I guess it's no wonder that Sprint, AOL and United Airlines all have cell phone stores run by InPhonic. You can't get a more ringing endorsement of pure evil than this trio. Actually you can... the really dangerous online arm of Amway (Quixtar or Quixar or Ishtar or whatever it's called) is also powered by InPhonic.

I'm hoping (praying to God, actually) that this saga is drawing to a close. I'm hoping that the phones go back, I call Cingular and give them the FedEx tracking number so they can see the phones were returned and the account gets canceled.