Phone trade in issues

Unfortunately, the "AT&T Store" in Authorized Retailer is not owned or operated by AT&T, but is instead an Authorized Retailer.  Your purchase transaction was through them and your bad information was from an employee of the operator of that store.  AT&T will follow their rules to the letter of the procedure, and if you didn't follow the procedure because a third party told you badly, AT&T is not going to bend the rules.

If that store will not fix this problem, then you should open a BBB complaint on "Mobily LLC" the operator of that particular store.

Really?  So AT&T stores are a retailer for AT&T and they allow these retailers to act  on their own?  No oversight?  The store will not help me and the next person is the District Manager and they won't even return a call.  Unbelievable!

Unfortunately, it appears that some lawyers and accountants have done some math and the cost of lost goodwill from the sort of crap you experienced is apparently more than offset by the income achieved from sales by these lowlifes.

That's not the experience we want you to have @phoneweary. Let's guide you in the right direction to get the help you need with your trade-in, please follow the below-mentioned steps: 

The Community Forums are a public support option where other users, and AT&T, will try and assist with high level support needs.   This means we won’t be able to look into account specific concerns.  To get the help you need for your unique issue, please review our  contact us page : https://www.att.com/support/contact-us/ and choose the best option to reach out to us.  You can call, chat, or reach out via social media and we can review your specific issue and provide you support.  If you feel your issue isn’t account specific, and can be answered generally, please let us know and we’ll be happy to help.

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CrystalS, AT&T Community Forums Specialist. 

I'm not trying to be rude but you were doing a TRADE IN promotion. That should have been first clue that you are REQUIRED to TRADE IN phone. If you read the promotion, you would have seen all the details that needed for credits to apply.

This is why I encourage people to read the promotions on the day they are going to participate in them. If you go into a physical store, you can still look up the promotion online and read all the details. Since the promotions can change weekly, a promotion that's available on Thursday night may not be available on Friday morning. 

Also don't necessarily consider that the employees of a store will know what the promotions are.

The promotions have the requirements published.  For example an unlimited data plan is required for all of the phone promotions.  Saw them do require a trade in, some of them don't. But it's important to read to know for sure