Why are 2 consecutive Galaxy s6's freezing/rebooting for me?

[AC Question]

I have a Galaxy s6 (standard) with Verizon that I bought in October. Earlier this year (February, I think) it started freezing and rebooting one day. I tried all of the troubleshooting options I could find before I finally did a factory reset. Then, it froze during the factory reset. I took it into a Verizon store and they somehow were able to factory reset it with tech support. I watched them do it and they did the same thing I did. It worked for about a day until it started freezing and rebooting again. I was able to get it work sometimes and then the other day I tried to charge my phone and it wouldn't boot at all. I called tech support yesterday and they sent me a new phone and told me to send in my old one.

Well, today I booted up my new phone and lo-and-behold, I'm having the same problems. At first, it froze on the setup wizard right away. I called tech support and they had me try to factory reset and it froze on "Samsung Galaxy s6" screen as well. They told me to send it in and they would send me ANOTHER replacement. Well after I got off the phone with them, it rebooted by itself and took me to the setup wizard. I set it up as a new device (did not restore), but I did enter my google account information. Everything worked great for about 2 hours.

Then it restarted once using the Gamestop App, then it got really bad when Google Play Store started updating Apps. Specifically, it crashed while updating Google Play Music and then I haven't been able to get the phone back on at all without it freezing/restarting less than 10 seconds after rebooting. I also noticed that Google Play Store recognized all the other apps from my old phone when it was doing its updates, and had them slated to "update" even though I didn't re-install any of them to this phone (e.g. S Health, DirecTV, NFL Mobile, etc.) or select any "recovery" options throughout the setup wizard or once in the phone's OS.

Could the issue be with my sim card? Google account? Or am I simply having bad luck with 2 phones is a row? I really need to use my google account for email purposes, but if the problem is with Google Play services or something, I'm screwed. What really sucks, is

 

[banditodecerveza]

Original author here. Signed up to clarify: the replacement they sent me was not "new," but refurbished. And the last sentence should have read "What really sucks, is I already called them back and told them the 2nd phone was now working and that I would send back the 3rd one when it comes in and my 1st one."

UPDATE:

Just did another factory reset and it got me all the way to the end. I skipped, however, the Google Account information and did not link my google account to my phone. I did no recovery at all, but it did ask me to sign-in to my Samsung Security account in the setup wizard (not that I think it has anything to do with these problems). As soon as I opened Google Play Store, however, the phone rebooted and froze at the Verizon screen. This was about fifteen seconds after reaching the home screen, so I have no idea if it was because of Google Play Store or just because it was the first App I opened. WTF???