How to Get More from Your SugarMama

by gLoBuS

Disclaimer:  Anything that you do with this information is your responsibility, not mine.

In the world of prepaid cell phones, Virgin Mobile is one of the top sellers of prepaid minutes.  Along with their empire, they've started to send out some kickbacks to their loyal customers.  Here I will show a very simply way of getting your kickbacks even quicker.

Virgin Mobile's current kickback program is called SugarMama: sugarmama.virginmobileusa.com

It's a fairly simple system that gives you rewards for providing feedback to Virgin about some online advertisements.  These ads are short videos from the likes of heavy.com, Sub Pop records, and Microsoft's Xbox 360.  These only take about a minute to watch, some are more unbearable than others, but there's a very simple way around all of this.

A simple observation of the path you take to earn your minutes shows us how to skip the video and just give feedback instead.

Let's take an ad from heavy.com for our example.

The sample URL is: cache.ultramercial.com/d/054-347/heavy_flash.html

Our URL will change to: cache.ultramercial.com/d/054-347/heavy_survey.html

Notice the only difference is changing flash to survey.

This technique could cut several minutes from your time spent watching Xbox 360 ads and in turn give you up to five minutes per day of free airtime.  For me this has cut my prepaid minutes in half on the days that I "watch" these videos.  For a guy who is only on his phone for ten minutes a day, this is a pretty sweet deal.

Along with the SugarMama program, there are other kickback deals that give out pretty decent rewards.

The Kickbacks program gives you free airtime whenever your friend buys $15 or more of airtime and lists you as the referrer.  This is nice when you have two phones in the family, and your little brother makes sure you get your kickbacks.  But the real kicker to this program is the reminder system used to let your friend know that they should "top-up" with you in mind.

In the Kickbacks menu (www.virginmobileusa.com/myvirginmobile/referral.do) there is a small set of text boxes at your disposal.

The top box is for your friend's phone number and the bottom is Virgin Mobile's reminder to "top-up."

Virgin's mistake was letting this box be modifiable.  This little reminder has now become your ticket to free outgoing text messages.  All you have to do is modify the contents of the text box and send it off.  The return address will be your cell phone's number but you won't be charged a nickel.  (Literally, their texts are five cents apiece.)

In conclusion, Virgin Mobile does provide a decent prepaid cell phone service while neglecting some basic protections for some of their web features.

I do plan on staying with Virgin Mobile, at least until they stop giving me kickbacks.