Incredibly frustrating and awful MJ+ support conversation

[Drexel]

I just had, what can be quickly summed up as a terrible support experience with MagicJack.

I have been using the MJ+ for a few months now to make phonecalls from home for work, to local Canadian conference numbers. These numbers all worked up to 3 days ago.

This morning I tried calling one of them, and I got the prepaid message about having to pay for a conference bridge for my company.

I did some searching and found that many people have experienced this problem in the past. So I thought I'd reach out to MJ support and see what they could do.

Terrible mistake.

All I got were generic responses from the first rep I spoke to. She then transferred me to another, who continued to quote lines from the TOS that do no apply to me as I am not in the United States. This ended with her effectively closing the conversation without my consent, without having addressed the problem.

Does anyone know of a way to circumvent the conference calling block?

Does anyone know of a way to lodge a complaint with MagicJack for this issue, as well as for a very poor customer service experience?

I have a copy of the service call transcript... I'm just not comfortable sharing it all here.

[Pilot]

That's MagicJack for you!
Learn to live with it the way it is.

[SteveHC]

There is no way to "circumvent" the issue, other than to try finding some other prepaid long distance company that uses a toll-free 800 access number and that is cheaper per minute than what MJ would charge you... good luck with that though, as many if not most of those LD services are no longer in business. If you REALLY need to make such calls very frequently, you may have no choice but to try to find another phone service that will meet your needs at an acceptable (but possibly more expensive) price.

You may or may not be able to make such calls within Canada using Google Voice; I have no idea what the situation with that is these days.

[greenman]

Drexel,

Is it possible you might have been calling more than sixty different numbers consecutively more than sixty times a day, with more than a few calls happening in any single given hour? If this is the case, magicJack has a policy against this kind of phoning behavior. It can come across like cold-calling. If they didn't have this policy, it would be easy for any fly-by-night company to snatch up a gross of these devices and use them to automate cold calls all over the US and Canada - sort of like when "Rachel from credit card services" calls -- you know the lady who comes from "Visamastercard" (one word, the way the phone reps answer) and tries to hijack your debt so they can charge you more than your current credit card.

I'm not saying that's what you did. I'm just asking if you used the phone a whole heck of a lot making numerous calls to different numbers.

[cell14]

As far as your customer experience goes : Caveat emptor. There is enough negative info about Magic Jack available that somebody who did basic due diligence research would not fall for this garbage.
It gets even worse when people try to use something which is just about a step above a child's toy for serious business.

There is a number of good providers for Canadian customers- VOIP.ms., Anveo and others which will give you a professional level service for a very low price. You may also try Google Voice which is free . However, many providers do block certain free conference call services or charge higher rates for those calls, at least in the US, because those are predatory companies which make gigantic profits on providing " free" conference calling services while charging exorbitant termination fees to the telecom providers.