12th Company Reaches Settlement With Florida Attorney General

Business Telecommunications Services, Inc., also known as ADMA Telecom, Inc. reached a settlement deal with the Florida State Attorney Generals Office in regards to the recent actions taken by Florida to crack down on the practice by phone card companies of delivering less minutes than promised. In June of this year, 10 companies had settled with the Attorney General (including IDT, Dollar Phone, STI and others) and then a few months later an 11th company, Cinco Telecom Corp. settled.

Terms of the settlement were similar to the other companies, with ADMA Telecom agreeing to disclose all fees and charges clearly and by delivering the advertised minutes. In addition the company also agreed to auditing for 3 years and to donate $75,000 to the Hispanic Institute, the organization that assisted the Attorney Generals office with their investigation.

The State's Economic Crimes division will also continue to look into other companies and has acknowledged that there are still a few more companies under investigation.

The official release from the Florida Attorney Generals Office can be found here.

Virgin Mobile Posts Decent Q3 Numbers

Prepaid mobile leader Virgin Mobile announced their Q3 earnings last week and while the numbers didn't blow anyone out of the water, they were rather encouraging. They rang up about 323.2 million in sales in Q3 with about 4.1 million of that in profit, not bad considering last quarter they made $3.6 million on $317.4 million in sales. Slightly less sales from last quarter but they manged to keep more from less, indicating a stronger operational efficiency and higher ARPU numbers (they average somewhere just north of $20 per month per user).

To show that Virgin is committed to maintain a more efficient workforce in these tough times they also announced that they would be cutting their workforce by 10 percent (roughly 45 jobs) in the coming quarter. While these cuts are not as bad as we see in other industries and companies, the mere suggestion of cutting jobs always leads investors and shareholders to loose confidence. The result of this announcement caused shares to fall by about 10%.

View Full Details About Virgin Mobile's Q3 Filing

Great Europe Prepaid Phone Card Commercial

Here is a commercial for the Great Europe Phone Card.

Pingo Adds Softphone

The popular rechargeable calling card from Ibasis called Pingo announced last week that they have added a new feature to their offer that will allow users to make calls from a softphone. The softphone is a PC based application that a user downloads from the Pingo site and he/she can use to make calls from their computer (internet connection required).

The softphone is not a new application and has long been offered by companies like Net2Phone, Skype, DeltaThree and many others but Pingo hopes that by adding this application they will open up a whole new user base of individuals outside of their current toll free and local access footprint. This service will be ideal for travelers and especially for those in the Middle East and Asia where softphone applications are commonly used. The only downside for Ibasis is that they will have a whole new fraud element that they will need to keep a close eye on going forward!

The one surprise of this offer is that they are not offering lower rates for using a softphone vs. the calling card. Odd since Pingo is actually able to save by not paying the inbound toll-free/local access charge for calls made via the softphone. I suppose they feel the convenience is the main attraction not a potential cost savings.

To learn more about this website visit their website softphone page.

New Calling Card Application Released For The IPhone

A new application for the Iphone has just been released that makes using calling cards from your mobile phone real easy. For a small fee users can download this application from itunes and install it on their Iphone. The application allows users to store multiple calling card access numbers and pins in one easy place and also allows them to call any one of their contacts using a calling card with a simple one touch dialing.

Iphone Calling Card Application Main Features:

• Set up multiple phone/calling card accounts and easily switch between them.


• Automatic card selection based on contact and/or number prefix.


• Set up a list of favorite numbers to dial, select any number from your contacts, or directly enter a phone number to be dialed.


• Full support for international prefixes (numbers stored starting with '+').


• Flexible call details setup allows for automatic dialing of most phone cards even if intermediate menu selections have to be made.


• Display local time for the contact to be called (time zone look up based on the phone number).

Full information on how to use this application and how to do the set up can be found at the following website: http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/CallingCard.html

To purchase the application visit Itunes and type in "calling card" in the search field

October Poll Results - Best Sales Months For Phone Cards

I would like to thank everyone who voted in our October poll "What is the best month for sales of phone cards." The votes have all been counted and here are the results:

1. December received 45% of the votes
2. May was second with 29% of the votes
3. November was third with 16% of the votes
4. August was fourth with 7% of the votes
5. September was fifth with 1% of the votes

All other months received no votes! So it looks like there are really no more than 5 possible good sales months for phone cards. I would like to thank everyone again and please be sure to vote on this months poll.

Vamos Phonecard Commercial

Here is a short Spanish language commercial for the Vamos prepaid calling card.

Potential Class Action Lawsuit Against Calling Card Companies

Well as if the calling card companies didn't have enough to worry about with all of the proposed government regulations and watch dog groups, it might just be getting a little worse with the announcement that the law firm of Statman, Harris & Eyrich, LLC is starting to look inot a potential class action lawsuit against some prepaid calling card companies including but not limited to alleged practices of CVT Prepaid Solutions, Inc.; Dollar Phone Services, Inc.; Dollar Phone Enterprises, Inc.; Dollar Phone Corp.; Dollar Phone Access, Inc.; Epana Networks, Inc.; Locus Telecommunications, Inc.; STi Phonecard, Inc.; Telco Group, Inc.; VOIP Enterprises, Inc.; Find & Focus Abilities, Inc.; and Total Call International, Inc.

This law firm specializes in class action lawsuits and is currently gathering data as well as customer complaints to decide how and if they should pursue this matter. So stay tuned and see if this graduates into a full fledged class action suit!

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/statman-harris--eyrich-llc/story.aspx?guid=%7B9FC977DA-5855-46E1-B05B-A48D77E6EF78%7D&dist=hppr