T-Mobile is giving a free year of unlimited LTE to customers who bring over Sprint cast-offs

T-Mobile’s certainly creative, not to mention bold.

The wireless company is now offering an incentive to its existing customers: Recruit an existing Sprint, Verizon, or AT&T customer to make the switch to T-Mobile, and both the old and new customer get a year of unlimited LTE for free. If the existing customer already has unlimited LTE, they’ll get a $10 credit for 12 months.

T-Mobile is asking its customers to “throw a lifeline” to those at other carriers, likely to push the company up to the third-most popular mobile carrier by the end of the year. It might also have something to do with the fact that Sprint recently changed its approach, eliminating its Framily plans and launching a shared data plan in its place.

T-Mobile launched its “Uncarrier” strategy in March 2013, which offered contract-free plans that started at $50/month. One year later, it increased the amount of data included for that price — doubling it, in fact — to 1GB.

What makes this all so interesting is that back in June, VentureBeat was pondering whether or not Sprint was in the market to buy T-Mobile. But by July, T-Mobile announced it had added 1.5 million new customers in the second quarter of 2014, marking the fifth quarter in a row the company had added a million plus customers. Talk about a role reversal!

It remains to be seen if T-Mobile’s latest move will push it past Sprint by year’s end but so far, odds are looking good.