Ya know those long distant phone cards? They seem like a better deal than the phone companies, but they're very sneaky. I just had a bad experience with this Asia Direct card.Ya know, they advertise with posters. And the rate for this one is 1 cent per minute. At the beginning of my call, I had 450+ minutes. Seems like a very good deal, right? The signal disappeared every now and then but I won't go into that. My call was disconnected after one hour and I had to retype the number and everything. This time 267 minutes were left! What? That's NOT one cent per minute! Nevertheless, I kept talking. My call was again disconnected after another hour! And this time 76 minutes were left! No way! This has to be a mistake! At this ratio, I should still have 20 minutes, right? No! After only 5 minutes, I got the 60-second warning and yup, it cut me off! So, instead of 450+ minutes, I only got 125 minutes!!!
So I called up their customer service and waited for 10 minutes to talk to a real person. There are hidden charges!!! Yeah, it says no connection fee, but there are network and other fees. And "everything is clearly written on the poster"! Blaming it on me? Go figure. I did spend 5 minutes trying to read it. I'm only 5 feet tall and the poster was 2+ feet above my head. The "details" are probably printed in 10 point type. That girl was probably only a phone operator and there was no use yelling at her. But I was too mad to even reason with "then why was my call cut off at every hour? So that you guys can charge me those fees every time?"
So, don't by any phone card from Direct.
4 comments:
LAME !
i cant say im suprised tho. Those outfits all scream "scamscamscam!" to me.. but then.. im paranoid by nature : )
Although, my ex-team lead from Romania used calling cards exclusively for long distance to that country and sweared by them. And we worked for a big telecom company! I guess you'd have to find the exact brand that works, but it may be costly to go through many scam ones.
But anyway Mabel, did you compare the final cost of your phone call ($10?) to what you'd pay to a regular long distance company? You did talk 2+ hours to Hong Kong right? Even if you talked to Canada through say Telus which charges 14c a minute, you'd end up paying $16.8 plus taxes! So you did get it dirt cheap (though not quite 1c a minute) - there may be cheaper deals around but it doesn't sound too bad to me. So I would definitely not call it a scam; you did get a service and the rate you got seems comparable to other providers. False advertising maybe, but only if they didn't have fine print. Much bigger companies do that kind of stuff (small print) all the time. You know what they say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The trick is knowing where reasonable boundaries are - meaning, being able to distinguish a really good deal from a TOO good a deal. Don't do impulse purchases; read twice, buy once (hey, I should patent that, sounds catchy).
Thanks Steve.
Hey Andrew. It's not like I impulse shop. I spent over 10 minutes in front of the store looking at all the posters and I still get tricked. If I didn't read anything, I deserved to be scammed.
Bloody hell!!! I typed a long reply and pressed control-c to save it in case post crashes - but by mistake I pressed control-q somehow and my Opera browser closed! Argh! So I won't type again. Anyway, it's false advertising then and they're indeed jerks.
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