Thanks for the link, hopefully I can avoid that route. Surprisingly I got in touch with sprints customer service and was told there is a ticket in place to have the engineering dept add my esn
So we'll see where that goes, meanwhile I did a bunch of reading and have the phone flashed and programmed to work with sprint now, at least the activation numbers are being directed to them whereas before it was some company asking for a credit card or something for long distance.