Complaint Review: mtccard

mtccard, as many of prepaid phone cards they charge for no service, if you don't use your card for 24 hours and some of them 48 hours your money will be gone.

you cannot hire a lawyer for 2 dollars, and that's why this SCAM still exist in the US, this kind of business is a SCAM and shame on USA government to let these people continuing this SCAM.

prepaid cards lies when you enter the phone number telling you how many minutes, put a timer and you will see that you spend only half time of what they said. for example they said enter your pin, after you do they said you have 2 Dollars, enter the phone number you wish to call, once you do they tell you : you have 20 minutes for this call ( some of them they say 20 units and that unite you cannot calculate it), after 8 minutes you call is done and you have insufficient fund to make a call. If you call them no body answers you, and if they do they put you on hold more than 40 minutes.

here what I found once I did some research online about phone cards:

Long-distance rates as low as 3 cents per minute are advertised for prepaid calling cards sold at convenience stores and on the Internet. But many of these offers are so bogus that the cards might actually be considered a form of gambling. The problem has become so bad that ABellTolls.com, a Web site that rates telephone pricing offers, refuses to list any prepaid calling cards at all. "There is really a big difference between the prepaid and billable calling card industry," Marc-David Seidel, co-founder of A Bell Tolls, said in an interview. "Those prepaid cards can be a really risky path." Billable calling cards don't charge customers for long-distance calls until after those calls are actually made. Prepaid calling cards, by contrast, require payment in advance for blocks of time. Buyers often don't learn until too late that prepaid cards add a "connection charge." This charge may be as high as several dollars for each call. In one of the first crackdowns on prepaid calling card scams, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced on July 26 a legal settlement with Televend, a Whitesboro, N.Y., company. According to Spitzer, Televend sold prepaid calling cards from vending machines with large signs that advertised rates as low as 3.9 cents per minute. "It was not disclosed, or it was disclosed in extremely fine print or on hard-to-read signs, that there were other fees and connection charges that greatly increased the price of a call," Spitzer said in a statement.

In the settlement, Televend agreed to pay $4,000 for public-service advertisements warning consumers about prepaid calling cards. Even worse than cards with high fees, however, are companies that repeatedly shut down and open under new names after selling blocks of time to numerous customers. "Many fly-by-night operations open up with flimsy financing, sell a bunch of their cards, and then stop paying the underlying (telephone) carrier," Seidel said. "The underlying carrier, which frequently is a large, well-known company, then cuts off the fly-by-night operation, thus stranding all of the consumers that had purchased the cards." Prepaid calling cards' popularity has grown enormously since the United States deregulated the long-distance industry. In 1995, sales of prepaid cards totaled $750 million, according to Consumer Action, a public-interest group in San Francisco. By 1999, prepaid calling cards were an industry with an estimated $4 billion in sales. Only 10 U.S. states have adopted or are considering disclosure requirements, Consumer Action says. "Fees and monthly charges show up only in very fine print, or not at all if there is no state disclosure requirement," the group said in a statement. It's often necessary to make long-distance calls from a phone away from your home or office.

So how do you protect yourself against prepaid calling card scams? A Bell Tolls recommends that you consider using a billable card that you don't have to prepay. The site's rankings show many legitimate calling card offers with interstate rates as low as 5.1 cents per minute. Seidel says the ratings are objective, although A Bell Tolls does receive a fee from some companies for referrals from its Web site. At the top of the ratings is the AccuLinq card from Cognigen Networks. Interstate calls are 5.1 cents per minute from major cities in Texas and Colorado, and 9.2 cents elsewhere, including taxes. The cost is 30 cents extra for each call made from a pay phone--a surcharge required by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The company charges no connection fee per call, but requires a minimum payment of $1 per month. Another company, Univance, serves customers in most of the United States for 6.35 cents per minute. In addition to the standard pay-phone surcharge, Univance has a connection fee of 25 cents per call and a minimum payment of $1.06 per month.