Our son ended up in jail and his phone calls were very expensive. When looking up address of jail, this company pops up and says you can pay a monthly fee for so many minutes per month. The client reviews were all good on the site. We paid for phone number the first month. We then added a letter to get the phone number to our son, for an additional fee. After 24 hours we called jail to see if our son had received phone number & were told they did not know what we were talking about. Also that they did not know anything about inmate aid. I tried to call repeatedly as well as sending email cancellation requests, but still no response. The numbers mail boxes were always full for all selections. We're going to have to cancel our credit card to avoid further charges. It's hard enough having a family member in jail, then to be taken advantage of because the reviews look good.
Mafio
Selma,#2Consumer Comment
Mon, July 16, 2018
I have been using inmateaid.com to send letters and pics to my homegirl that's incarcerated. Since I am a millennial I like to do everything on my phone. I'll be damned if I picc up a pen and paper to write someone knowing that I can just do it from my phone. I send pictures, letters, lyrics to songs, and whatever else I want to send and it always gets to her. Only one time it took about a week and a half at the most for her to get my letter. The only flaw that I found in this company is that one time it charged me $2.98 twice for one letter including pictures, but I didn't have time to trip over that. I am a little hesitant about trying the phone service though I'm not going to lie. Maybe one day I will live a little and give it a try. Other than that I give the site two thumbs up for its letter sending services.
InmateAID
Greenacres,#3REBUTTAL Owner of company
Fri, September 08, 2017
InmateAID offers a discount telephone service to help reduce the cost of inmate calls to their family and friends. We make it very clear on our website that we do not replace the prison phone company, we provide a local number that forwards the inmates calls to your current phone number. When the inmate dials the local number we provide, the prison phone company charges the local rate instead of the egregious long distance rate. We are not the prison phone company. Whether you do business with us or not, you always have to do business with the prison phone company. They have a monopoly on all calls going out of the prison. They typically pay the States tens of millions in commissions earned by charging exorbitant rates to families and friends of those incarcerated. We are an online company and provide several electronic methods to contact us in the event of an issue. We also provide a toll free number as well but have a limited staff to answer the phone. We do our best to respond to all requests for assistance but sometimes we miss one. We have been in business since 2012 and have helped our customers save millions by reducing the cost of inmate calls. We strive for 109% satisfaction but know we can't always make everyone happy. Regardless, our goal is 100%.
FloridaNative
Palm Beach Gardens,#4Consumer Comment
Wed, May 17, 2017
When you are looking at reviews, you don't want to look at the website reviews for the company you are considering for their services or product. Those reviews have a high chance of being fake.
You want to check third party websites to see if what the reviews are for the company or service you want to purchase. The third party websites would be listed outside of the company website (like ripoffreport.com and similar). That way you get consumer reviews from people that have actually used the product or service for the most part. You still have to do some due diligence on the company. If there are no reviews - that is a bad sign too.