Prepaid phone cards are commonly-used, convenient and user friendly devices that many individuals use for making international or domestic phone calls. While many have found these devices to be truly useful, some call cards, sadly, have been involved in some manner of phone card fraud.

Phone card fraud refers to the theft of a firm's or users ' telecommunications service, and this has been an ongoing concern for many consumers, government regulators and private telecoms providers. However, if the individual consumer is not vigilant, and does not report fraudulent charges, the fraudsters and scam artists out there will continue to rake in profits, and fool more customers.

Consumers Should Play A Wider Role In Fighting Call Card Fraud

Since most local phone card providers and firms are required by law to bill for other firms that provide telephone services, there is a wider possibility that fraudulent charges or transactions may appear, and could land on your phone bill. Consumers are an important asset in fighting fraud in a ll forms, and should play a larger role in helping eradicate phone fraud, because frequently the first step in detecting a fraudulent transaction or scheme is by identifying and reporting illegal, or unauthorized charges that appear suddenly on your bills, or may suddenly wipe out your card's remaining balance.

Scam Artists Are Still On The Prowl For More Phone Card Victims

Despite frequent crackdowns and ordinances or measures implemented to fight phone-related rip-offs, the scam artists and thieves are still out there, busy creating new methods of committing phone card fraud. These mindless individuals always seem to find newer methods of getting out of reach of regulators and the phone firms that try to close in on them.

You could be a potential victim of a so-called phone company "salesperson," who is out to trick you into switching your prepaid card for something else, or may give you false claims to entice you on transferring to their service, which in the end, could result in you seeing your card's remaining call times to be suddenly wiped off the system.

Fighting Back Against Prepaid Card Fraudsters

If you discover unauthorized charges or other evidence of fraud, you need to quickly report these to your local phone firm, long distance carrier, or through the state public service or utility commission. You may also send in your complaints to the offices of the Federal Communications Commission for proper resolution of your concerns and problems. You also can ask your calling card firm to issue one that does not have your PIN on it, or you may also memorize your PIN and do not write it on the card itself, to prevent it from being seen by others.

The increase in the number of prepaid phone card providers in the market these days has been triggered by low start-up costs. In a large number of of cases, some service providers have taken customers' money and left them with nothing but worthless cards. There also have been other reported forms of unlawful or deceptive marketing methods and practices involving prepaid call cards, and some phone card providers also have been noted to fail to tell consumers about fees, surcharges and other costs, or hide them in small, difficult-to-read print.