I found a Cingular SIM card a few weeks back at a football game. I have T-Mobile service. I haven't had a chance to bring it by a Cingular store, I would imagine they could track down the owner, would it do any good to turn it in to them? Would it be of any use to me?

 

If the owner reported the Sim lost/stolen, then it won't work ever again. If it was never used, you'd be able to activate it on Cingular. Probably worth about $15 on ebay if new.

 

toss it. . it's useless.

 

Why not stick it in your phone and find out before you take it down to Cingular? Easiest way to do it. Chances are it's someone's lost SIM and has been deactivated.

If your phone is locked, a quick call to T-Mobile will sort that out. (Assuming you're postpaid and not prepaid.)

 

Chances are.. its someone's old SIM.. its rare to see people swap SIM cards
in this country... and if someone lost it.. they've probably called
the provider to replace it for them anyway.

 

Yup, people generally don't even know what a SIM is in the US! And there's a very good reason for this: our postpaid rates are so much cheaper than prepaid if you use any decent amount of talk time. (And even if you don't, you're likely to just use a single provider.)

In other countries, of course, it's much more common to have unlocked phones and affordable prepaid rates. In some places I've found myself carrying multiple local SIMs�for example, in the UK where I carry a prepaid Orange SIM that will roam in the rest of Europe, as well as a prepaid Mobile World SIM that won't roam outside the UK but has super-cheap 5p/min rates to the US. Plus my US T-Mobile SIM, so I'm swapping back and forth often enough since I only like to carry two phones ("only" two! ) that I might manage to lose a prepaid SIM and not notice for a while. But in the US I'd say it's well over a 99% chance that any SIM you found is going to already be deactivated. I'd certainly notice pretty quickly if I lost my T-Mobile SIM back home!

The only time I ever swap my SIM in the US is if I'm trying out a new phone, or playing with a friend's phone (or vice versa.)

 

I was in the same boat.. I had over 7 pre-paid SIM cards from countries (excluding US) but it was just too complicated to give out the numbers
and keep track of the expiration dates/refills.

Now I only have one international post-paid account and my usual two US
mobile phone accounts. Life is much more simple now

just FYI, the post-paid international is Airtel. Local calls are pretty cheap in
almost every country.

 

I got the code to unlock my phone, I stuck the Cingular SIM and the screen says

Unregistered SIM
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