Why to keep away from diamondcard.us
A few days ago I was wondering if there was actually a real alternative to Skype for calling overseas landlines from the internet. This is not simply PC-PC VoIP.
Of course you all would say: Ekiga!
Not actually, yet.
Of cource Ekiga has support for this through the so called Ekiga Call Out service, but…
This service actually relies on a provider called diamondcard.us from Dreamtime.net Inc. Please keep in mind this name so that you can safely avoid it. My experience with it has actually been a nightmare and above all I have lost 10$ for a pathetic company with weired fraudulent paranoiac policies.
The bottom line is that Ekiga’s partner diamondcard.us made me waste 4 days after they withdrawn the money from my credit card waiting for them to enable my account to call landlines and wasted 10$ money for no service at all!!
After having registered filling their form with all my data and given them my credit card number to charge my account with some money they began telling me:
1) I had to provide a landline telephone number (usually when you apply for a phone number why should people require you to already have one? If not for selling it to advertisement agencies later on…)
2) make an international call to the US or to the UK. (if I was willing to spend all my money in an international call just for having a talk with those guys I would have rather spent it calling my overseas friends!)
3) Of course they offered to call me after I provided them with a phone number but actually never did so.
4) I have sent them several emails asking them to either enable my account or refund me the money I had given them for a service they were not actually providing me. No way to get my money back. Their so called “processing costs” for refunding customers are, guess what, more than 10$!
I eventually signed on with Skype and I had an immediately working phone number to call friends, without having to worry for my privacy and to hand out my phone numbers to be resold for advertising.
If you do care of your money keep away from diamondcard.us!
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Thanks for the warning…
I prefer Voipdiscount
I’ve used Diamondcard for years and never had any problems.
I have been using diamondcard for nearly a year now and its work beautifully,
I have it setup on my nokia phone and other VOIP adapters, so when i am abroad i can call using my phone (when Wifi is around), Skype relies on you having the Skype software and the rates they offer are frankly dismal, while with Diamondcard I can use what ever software i wish,
cheers,
Abs
Thanks for the warning. I was considering diamondcard but was unsure after reading the TOS and privacy policy. Now I know to stay away.
I have used Diamondcard for a year, having used SkypeOut the previous year. I am a linux user, and for me SIP-based diamondcard is half the cost ($15/yr for my usage vs $36/yr flat rate) and my SIP VOIP is more stable than Skype VOIP. My Skype would drop calls a couple times per hour if I tried to talk longer than 20mins.
I also like the ability to use *whatever* SIP client I want. I currently use Twinkle the most, though sometimes I’ll open up Ekiga to see if it meets my needs yet. The world will be a better place when an easy Skype allows SIP users to talk to their users.
Yes, Diamondcard is paranoid about the first credit card deposit of funds. I suspect they want to keep down CC fraud. After that recharges are easy peasey. They called me on my cellphone to verify I was who I said I was. By the time I got home my account was working fine.