Send Telcel credit using 7373

[John]

I just found out about a Telcel feature you can use to send phone credit to a friend's phone. It's called Pasa Tiempo Amigo, or "Time Pass Friend". Telcel has a micro-website devoted to this feature, including a digital version of the flyer I picked up: Pasa Tiempo Amigo. It shows a crying girl with the slogan "Save a friend" - aww, how cute.

You can use it to send a minimum of $5, and up to $100 (all prices are in pesos) of credit at a time. It works like this, send an SMS message containing the recipients number, followed by a space, followed by the amount of pesos credit you wish to send, to phone number 7373. For example, to send $50 to a friend, enter "9841010101 50" and send to 7373.

There is a $0.85 charge for sending the SMS message, and the recipient gets charged $3.00 for receiving the credit. You can use this service up to 10 times a month. You can send only paid credit, not bonus credit.

One less excuse your friend now has for not returning your call.


It is quite interesting, when doing research on this, I found that it is a very popular scam in Mexico to use this feature to trick people into sending them phone credit. The scams try to convince people that there is a secret code to double or triple their credit.



This service probably isn't useful for most people. But, I was able to use it today to transfer some credit off of a phone we keep active for our visiting friends/family. I thought I'd share this info in case someone else may benefit from it.

[naoautorizada]

Long time lurker - finally registered to say thanks for this tip.
It is VERY useful to us as we spend time in different locations and moving the minutes to the phone with the local number for where we are at will save us big bucks.

[mnmz]

After your 60 days, when your minutes have been blocked on the telcel plan, telcel will not open up your line with the 7373 method of sending minutes. You need to buy a new card to have access to your line again.

[John]

Originally Posted by mnmz

After your 60 days, when your minutes have been blocked on the telcel plan, telcel will not open up your line with the 7373 method of sending minutes. You need to buy a new card to have access to your line again.

The terms and conditions in Spanish were a little bit complicated for my limited Spanish intrepretation. However, the original policy I was confused on is

Tu fecha de expiración no se modifica en el caso que tu línea este activa. Si tu línea está inactiva, el saldo que te envíen tendrá una vigencia de 7 días. (Quoted from this page)

There are two parts to this. First, if the recipient is active (they have recharged within 60 days), the transferred credit is valid as long as the remainder of the credit on the recipient's account. However, if the recipient is inactive (user has not recharged within 60 days), the passed credit is only good for 7 days.

I'm open to other interpretations.



And, just a minor correction from my original post. The brochure I was using for a majority of the information states that you can only perform this service 10 times during a month. The website states that you can send up to 15 times during a month. I'm not sure that matters to most people, but again, I thought I'd point it out.