Many of you may have heard of Mig33. For those who haven't, they're a mobile social networking community built primarily for emerging markets. My understanding is that a large part of their revenues comes from enabling cheap phone calls.
And they really are cheap, at least the rack rates.
What they don't make obvious, however, is that after a mere 90 days of buying credit, the company AUTOMATICALLY and without otherwise notifying you CANCELS THE CREDIT. Not so cheap now, is it?
Scoundrels.
Skype does something similar but they do they send a notification in advance of any such expiry. Moreover, all you need to do to keep the credit valid is to make a phone call, even for just one second, and this resets the clock for all your credits to a further 180 days. I last bought Skype credit in 2006!
Mig33's clock resets every 90 days and you HAVE to use it within those 90 days. No resets.
I just realised today that I'd lost a fair amount of credit I bought a few months ago. This was more than 5 and a half hours worth of credit if I were to call India and more than 7 and a half hours if I called the US, for example. Even more unusual for a mobile-based company, many of whose users don't use PCs, I could only find out I'd lost my credit by logging into my account with my PC browser.
Scoundrels.
I wonder if Mig stands for Mobile Internet Goons.
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