An easy way to get an iPhone on a prepaid plan

*Apologies for doubling up on the iPhone news today. One of the big advantages of activating a phone at home through a program like iTunes: there will end up being ways to beat the system. And when you beat the system, you are rewarded handsomely — unless what you’re doing is illegal, in which case we know nothing. Anyway, we found a couple of reports this morning of people signing up for an iPhone on a prepaid plan. The first was a mere account of activating a prepaid iPhone. We wondered how it was done. But then we came across this little number that made us think, “why didn’t we think of that?” Prepaid means no credit check. No credit check means no social security number. By the transitive property of equality, we know that prepaid means no entering of your social security number. After you figure that out, the rest is easy. Just enter in a bogus SSN (a string of all the same numbers, or alternating numbers, will suffice), and voila! Failed credit check. And then you’re offered a prepaid plan. We found another prepaid iPhone activation report, but this guy didn’t seem to have any trouble, and didn’t report using a fake SSN. Though he did open our eyes to something we hadn’t yet considered:

Most people forget when they sign a contract, there are government-mandated surcharges (i.e. universal service fund, 911, etc.) that add a sizable amount to a monthly bill. Not so with prepaid; that’s factored in to your per-minute cost.

Overall, he didn’t report any trouble activating the iPhone via prepaid. We like this, since it seems that major carriers often give their prepaid customers the cold shoulder. With all this considered, if we found and $600 on the ground, we’d seriously consider getting the iPhone on prepaid. [The Unofficial Apple Weblog] [New York City.com]]]>