To keep my long story short this is what's going on: I bought a PS3 at Best Buy and got the 2-Year Warranty a long with it. I ended up getting my PS3 stolen and I came up with an idea. I want to buy a broken PS3 for cheap, return it to Best Buy and get a new one. -Will Best Buy replace my broken PS3 with a brand new one or will they try to get it repaired instead? -Will my plan fail if they realize that this broken PS3 in not the one I bought from them? Do they check the PS3 VIN number? I really need to know if this will work before I buy a broken PS3; and I hope it does because I miss my games and blu-ray movies.
You are kidding right? I am sure they will check the VIN number. And warranties do not cover physical damage. Get a different idea.
LOL! That is whay Julio said, so I just went with it. I meant UPC or whatever the hell the barcode numbers are called.
Blah....I looked up information on other stolen PS3s and everyone else said VIN number. Didn't even realize what I was saying. Let me try this again: -Will my plan fail if they realize that this broken PS3 in not the one I bought from them? Do they check the PS3 Serial number? I can't afford to buy another PS3, and I have a a $100 Warranty with no use for it. Unless Best Buy replaces stolen items, I think I'm out of ideas.
I am pretty sure they check Serial numbers. And yes your plan would not work if they do check Serial numbers.
try it anyway .. I remember sharing my brother's warranty for a laptop at BB...we had the exact same model..and with our combined # of services to our laptops he was able to get a brand new laptop..heh..this was of course like 5 years ago.
I had a friend who sold his playstation1 to a kid and it ended up not working. Instead of taking it back he went to Wal-Mart and bought a new one. Then he switched the broken one and returned it, and gave the new one to the kid. Maybe you could try that or maybe switch the numbers to the broken one. I dont know anything about the PS3 so I dont know if that even is possible
All the new systems have a bar code with serial number on them and when they sell the unit they scan that too which goes on the receipt and warranty information. I remember them doing that with my original XBOX. So I doubt you could get away with it.
Do you have homeowner's or renter's insurance? File a claim. It is not the fault of Best Buy or Sony that your PS3 was stolen and therefore it is not their responsibility to replace it. Should you choose to defraud them, you are committing a crime.
That is handled by the Department of Redundancy Department. Actually, yeah, many of them do. In fact, most places do NOT check the serial number on your console. Is your Best Buy warranty a repair plan or a product replacement plan? I know that Gamestop, Toys R Us, and a few others that do product replacement plans will indeed ship the broken PS3 off to a refurbishing warehouse, but they give you one from their stock right then. Why? Retailers don't handle those plans; an outside company does. The outside company figures (and rightly so) that most people will never use their plans. People either believe them to be too difficult to work with or will lose the receipt or will have no need etc. So it works the same way insurance companies do. But retailers get a small cut of the profits, and that's PURE profit with no risk of financial loss (hence why, for those of us who've worked retail, there's so much pressure to sell those plans). And since the companies who are buying the broken consoles are repairing them for refurbishing, they don't really care either. Therefore, neither retailers nor clerks care what condition the console is in; Gamestop and Toys R Us both say as long as I brought in most of the pieces, it's covered. That might be a bit of a stretch, but you get the picture. If I were you, I'd place a call to Best Buy asking about the details of the plan. When I got my PS2 (RIGHT after it came out -- talk about LUCK), I bought a plan from them. It required me to ship the PS2 out, and that company sent me a check for the full amount I paid (which was great 'cause the PS2's price had JUST dropped by $100). They might have changed the plan now to something more contemporary with the others (just swapping the actual product out), but getting all the information is paramount. But the whole point of that long spiel is that no one obsessively looks over your console to see what condition it's in when you get it replaced. They KNOW it's broken. Otherwise, you wouldn't be there. One last little side story: at the height of its populaity, as a selling point for the TRU exclusive dance pads for DDR (and these pads REALLY sucked), I mentioned our Buyer Protection Plan to customers. They could buy a dance pad for $15 (which, let's face it, was going to break. But ANY dance pad will break) and a BPP for $5. When the pad broke, they could get a second pad for free and buy another $4 BPP. And when that broke, the cycle repeated itself. I generated SO MANY sales that way; unlimited $4 crappy dance pads beats shelling out $40 for each good pad you buy.
