I’m concerned that my grandparents might be getting scammed by their phone provider, Cricket Wireless. Here’s what’s happening: They typically use budget Android phones, and this issue has now occurred twice. Both times, the phone randomly stopped allowing calls, showing an error that said the phone was in airplane mode—even though it wasn’t enabled. When we took the phones to the Cricket store, the employees claimed the phones were ‘no good’ and sold my grandparents a new phone each time. After the second incident, they called Cricket’s support line and mentioned that the same issue happened with their previous phone. Support ended up refunding the money for the new phone (and let them keep it) while fixing the issue on the ‘broken’ phone. Now, the same issue has happened again with their replacement phone, and the store seems to have forgotten the situation. They’re insisting the phone is no good again. I’m confused and frustrated because I’ve owned plenty of budget phones and have never encountered anything like this. Has anyone experienced this before or have insight into what could be happening? I just want to help my grandparents avoid being taken advantage of in the future.
You have a solid reason to make a formal complaint to Cricket regarding that store and name the employees involved. Cricket is liable, but those employees are probably getting incentives to sell phones. If Cricket refunded the phone costs, this tells you they know very well they didn’t need new phones. Report them.
Yes, your grandparents are being taken advantage of. Those cheap phones sold at those shops usually don’t have the hardware to support all the bloatware they add. Many users don’t know how to uninstall it, so they end up replacing the phone every couple of years. I’d suggest buying them a decent phone and switching to a different provider, like one with at least 6GB of RAM and more storage.
I had a cricket salesperson tell me 4GB was enough and their plan allowed you to download another 4GB of RAM. I just nodded and walked out. Didn’t even want to explain cloud storage to them.
Hello, this is Microsoft support! I can see you’re having issues… to help, please just send $100 in gift cards to BLA BLA BLA. lmfao 
Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
Avoid Cricket. Verizon has a prepaid service. Bring your own phone.
The phone probably just needs a network reset. That has happened to my iPhone a couple of times. Verizon told me it had something to do with frequent traveling and too much network settings data.