Transferring money from one prepaid wireless provider to another

by Christina
(Ragland, AL)

My friend has a verizon prepaid phone and i am selling her my i-wireless (sprint) prepaid cell phone. Can she transfer her money from her verizon prepaid account to the iwireless (sprint) prepaid phone?

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Apr 11, 2011
 Transferring Funds Between Prepaid Wireless Accounts
by: PrepaidWirelessGuy

I've been getting a good amount of people asking this question. I suppose with there being so many great prepaid wireless options available, there's a lot more switching going on than ever before.


The straight answer is unfortunately no, you can not transfer funds between carriers. Some carriers don't even allow transferring of funds between postpaid and prepaid, or between prepaid brands within their own company. This is sometimes due to system limitations, while sometimes it is simply a business policy related to customer lifetime value economics.


While as customers we'd all love to be able to transfer funds in this way, it wouldn't really make sense for carriers to allow this to happen. It would basically be a straight loss for them.


That's not to say that carriers won't sometimes have special campaigns where they do offer such a transfer, though it wouldn't be a straight transfer, but rather they would have to validate how much money you have on your old account, and agree to apply it to a new account on their service. The system integration to do this automagically as is the case for number portability, would be astronomical. Though I have to say that I don't recall ever seeing such a campaign.


Prepaid wireless carriers used to virtually all offer first month free (for unlimited plans), however, even that became a problem. Customers would often cancel their service after the first month, return the phone (to retailers that would accept returns withing 30 days), and then buy another phone and rinse and repeat. Most carriers have since removed this "feature."


Carriers would be better off simply providing a sale on a new phone, and/or a discount on the service for a new customers. We see these types of promotions regularly.


In your friend's case, their best bet is probably just to finish out the funds/term on their Verizon phone, and then start service on i-wireless thereafter.

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