Rechargeable cards can sometimes expire without warning, taking all your money. To keep the account, you may have to deposit a certain amount every six months. If you don’t call long-distance often enough, there may be money
stuck in the account that you will never be able to use--it just vanishes when
your account expires.
This was not obvious: my card said, ’’Card expires six months from last use or recharge, ’’ making it seem as if the card would expire only after six months of complete inactivity. Actually, ’’whichever comes first’’ is implied, so six months after my last deposit, they cancelled my account even though I make regular short calls.
There is a minimum deposit amount of something like $20. They tempt you to put in more by giving you ’’free’’ minutes, which seems like a convenient way to avoid the hassle of recharging. Of course, you just lose more in the end if their misleading wording had tricked you.
I don’t remember any warning from the automated voice when I used the card just last week. But even a last-minute warning wouldn’t have helped me recover the excess money I’d deposited.
I used a calling card to avoid paying for long distance service to make
very short once-weekly calls. The card is a ’’Call ’n Carry Rechargeable’’ from
ILD Telecommunications. I think it is a scam. Perhaps more experienced users have seen worse.