Verizon’s $300 Trade-In Offer

Verizon wants to pay for your pilgrimage to the wireless carrier.

“If your new network isn’t working for you, come home to Verizon and get $300 when you trade in your smartphone and buy a new one,” the company says in this recent radio ad.

A few hundred dollars in cold hard cash may seem like good enough reason to join Verizon but that’s not actually what the wireless carrier is offering. A disclaimer at the end of the radio ad rushes through the details of the offer — even after several listens, it was still hard to decipher every word — but Verizon’s website discloses the caveats (emphasis added):

New smartphone device payment activation and port-in req’d. $300 = $200 trade-in VZW gift card + $100 bill credit (applied within 2-3 billing cycles). Trade-in must be in good working condition.

So, it’s not $300 that you can spend as you please, on dinner or opera tickets, for example, but rather $200 that goes back to Verizon and $100 that goes toward a future bill. Perhaps this is not a bad deal, but to say that you “get $300” by trading in your smartphone and switching to Verizon is a bit misleading.

Find more of our coverage on Verizon here.