Swapping your old smartphone to get some money off on a new Galaxy S10 sounds like a great deal, but wannabe S10 owners are finding that Samsung is refusing their trade-ins due to errors that they haven’t made.
In order to trade-in successfully, users have to declare what device they’re sending, reset the phone to factory default, make sure it’s not cracked and can power on again, then send it to Samsung within a week of their purchase.
It sounds easy enough, but several users have received messages from Samsung saying that the company is charging them more money as their trade-ins were not compliant, according to a report by Android Police.
A common problem is that Samsung is reportedly claiming that users are sending them a phone that's different than the one that they declared. Some of these anecdotes are based on reddit user testimony alone. However, others have photographed their devices as they packed them up, and they too received a similar message claiming that they’d sent in an older device than the one they shipped.
In addition, two specific cases involve one user being told they never sent a device at all, and another that they’d sent in a keyboard instead of a Galaxy Note 9.
Others are apparently failing to satisfy the factory reset/power-on rules. This included some cases where devices had both problems simultaneously, which presents the question of how Samsung checked the phone’s status if it couldn’t be turned on.
Samsung does now offer users the opportunity to reject its trade-in offer and have their devices returned since it updated its terms of service. But this still seems like a problem that Samsung needs to address.
