

Free worldwide calls for a month - x-sam
http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/prices/subscriptions/unlimited-world

======
AYBABTME
I once had a paid for account with Skype. One day I woke up with my account
hacked into because of their poor security procedures, and the hacker having
drained all the money (enjoying the automatic recharge), making international
calls, until the limit of automatic recharges per day got exhausted.

I was curious about the break-in of my account because I always used good
security practices, having a unique password for Skype, always logging in over
https or the Skype client. Also I use a Linux distribution (Arch) so the
chances of being infected by a virus of having a key-logger installed are
pretty low. I found out that tools to expose any Skype accounts password were
readily available online, so my security practices were pretty irrelevant.

Given that Skype's security is non-existent, I since assume that whatever info
I put in my account is public and that there is no protection or security of
my data whatsoever.

Since then, I revoked their access to my PayPal and my credit card. They are
not trustworthy of my money, and I keep hearing from time to time about new
huge security holes in their accounts. I do not recommend that anybody
authorize any payment with them.

~~~
lrem
Just yesterday I learned about a flaw that, knowing the previous one, allowed
you to change password recovery email address on any Skype account.

------
toyg
"After the first month, your subscription will automatically continue and
payments will be taken monthly unless you cancel within 27 days of the start
date."

Oldest trick in the book. They must be a bit desperate.

~~~
netcan
It's all about how you sell it. Subtle difference that make it completely
different.

\- No obligation 30 days free

\- Sign up & get one month free

~~~
3825
I can attest to that. I signed up the day the offer came on deals.woot just to
find the destination I wanted to reach was not supported. Promptly cancelled.
They say I still have the free month.

it is a bit sketchy that they don't accept amex though...

~~~
lostlogin
Here (NZ) Amex has higher fees than other cards, and until recently, they were
way, way higher.

~~~
jisaacstone
When I ran a retail shop in the US I never accepted AMEX because the fees were
significantly higher, mostly because of the flat monthly fee and low volume of
people using AMEX.

Frankly I don't know how they are still around. Since everyone with AMEX
always has a back-up card there is no incentive at all for merchants to accept
it.

~~~
netcan
The original way they did things was by being available only to rich people
and then trying to get merchants to treat them extra nice. These days they
charge merchants and bribe consumers with extra goodies. If you're into points
or miles, you can usually get more on Amex or Diners.

------
rb2k_
You'll have to authorize with paypal/cc.

You can immediately cancel the subscription:

"You've cancelled your Unlimited World subscription. You can continue to make
calls until it expires on December 15, 2012. No further payments will be taken
unless you reactivate this subscription."

~~~
Lord_DeathMatch
Is this within the Skype or the Paypal interface?

~~~
ponyous
"If you want to cancel during your first month, that’s easy to do. Simply sign
into your account and disable the subscription by clicking Subscription
settings on the Call phones tab."

------
jcrei
It doesn't actually include all the world, and very few countries where you
can call mobile phones for free.

[https://secure.skype.com/account/call-
phones/settings/free?p...](https://secure.skype.com/account/call-
phones/settings/free?package=global-region-landline-world-v3-unlimited)

<http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/prices/pay-monthly/>

The US is included (both landlines and mobile phones)

~~~
lucaspiller
> The US is included (both landlines and mobile phones)

I guess that is why they call it "worldwide".

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Hehe, just like the World Series only includes the baseball teams that matter.

~~~
djloche
in fairness, the USA based baseball teams harvest players from all over the
world. If you're at the professional level of skill and consistency, no matter
where you live, you have a shot at playing in the majors in the states. The
most recent world series teams provide ample evidence of this.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Yeah, I'm sure that's appreciated by the professional teams in Japan, South
Korea, Taiwan, Dominican Republic and Cuba.

------
anonymouz
> A fair usage policy applies. Excludes special, premium and non-geographic
> numbers.

As so often, unlimited actually means some unspecified "fair usage" policy
that can be interpreted by them at will.

~~~
trotsky
im not a fan of that either, but at least for voip i'd be pretty surprised if
it was possible to bump into a soft limit without doing something obviously
abusive like resale or using the circuit 24/7. Mostly the only thing they're
worried about is losing customers to resellers. The worse i'd expect otherwise
would be an occasional "mysterious" dropped call to limit calls that lack
active participants.

------
trotsky
it's interesting how well some established pricing models can hold up even as
the underlying cost structure radically changes. even among this tech savvy
crowd people will regard this as some kind of deal even while we all know
optical data costs are approaching zero [1].

voice is of course just super low bitrate data with a legacy last mile that
(sometimes) requires a DA converter. tricky? not at all. at least in the us
and places with a similar regulatory environment it's awesome - actually way
easier and cheaper than pushing pure bits, at least when you're up at a tier
1/tier 2 level. imagine if the government mandated free open access peering
for local ip traffic - already tiny ip traffic costs would probably drop
almost as much as the fiber glut caused. yet that's basically what you can do
with voice in these markets, with some exceptions.

every all you can eat voip provider offers 30 days or more free, usually with
a lot more features, inbound, no calling restrictions, etc. why not when it
will probably cost them way less than a dollar (at least for outbound only)
and whatever keywords they are buying on google probably cost several dollars
(informed wild ass guess) and aren't anywhere near as qualified.

for comparison's sake if you want cheap US/CA outbound calls it is easy to
find deals like 5000 minutes that don't expire for $5.00 and doesn't require
any recurring billing.

Now obviously it doesn't matter too much since even overpriced anyone's voip
is still a small fraction of an hours work, i just find it funny that people
think a free month is some kind of deal yet wouldn't in a million years vote
up a story about netflix offeraing a free month of streaming, something that
probably costs them a couple of orders of magnitude more.

[1] some rounding errors may apply

------
adambyrtek
Sounds great, but it's not completely worldwide. The offer covers mobiles in 7
countries and landlines in 40 countries.

------
mmaunder
It's a paid subscription that sets up recurring monthly billing of $10.95. Fix
the post title OP.

------
Osmium
I understand the marketing, but I can't help but feel faintly irritated that
I'm already paying for a Skype subscription. Should I cancel it and get my
free month and then renew it again? ...

~~~
levymetal
It's the same as all other companies. "Switch to our Halifax, and get £100
free. Offer only available to new customers". It's rare to see a company that
rewards existing customers instead of disregarding them and focusing on the
new ones.

~~~
Osmium
Pleasingly some mobile networks in the UK are doing this, but that's only
because they have an incentive to retain customers. I don't know of a good
competitor to Skype. Google Voice, perhaps, except it lacks subscriptions and
a nice native iOS app (to my knowledge).

------
smartial_arts
So they are trying to get some good PR now?

~~~
joezydeco
No, they're counting on people not cancelling the auto-renewing payment.

~~~
calinet6
God, this is almost as bad as Vonage. It's 30-second-TV-pitch low.

------
Techasura
never, ever my credit info disclosed to skype.. again, never.

~~~
Osmium
What happened? Anything potential customers should know about? I appreciate
the flaw recently, but I wasn't aware of a way a third party could steal my
money or my card details...

~~~
ZoFreX
Just a continual procession of major security issues, never with a proper
response or analysis from them.

------
x-sam
Bad excuse for such huge holes in our security.

------
denzil_correa
It looks like a potential banana skin for customers.

    
    
       Trial must be redeemed by 15/11/2012. Offer available only to existing Skype users who have been registered with Skype more than 29 days. To qualify for the offer, you must provide valid payment details. After the first month, your subscription will automatically continue and payments will be taken monthly unless you cancel within 27 days of the start date. Only one free Unlimited World subscription can be claimed per customer. Offer not available in China, Korea, Russia or Taiwan.

------
FrojoS
Is this smart? What if hundreds of millions of people now start doing hour
long calls during this month? If the quality goes down, this wouldn't be good
advertisement and would also anger existing costumers.

Is VoIP bandwidth so low by todays standards, that they can scale without
problems if they have to?

~~~
r3m6
Skype is peer to peer. That this THE clever invention that put them ahead of
all competing services when they launched. They can scale without any
significant additional bandwidth or server costs.

~~~
macuenca
This is true only for Skype to Skype connections. Calls that have to reach The
PSTN[1] need to be routed through telephony servers somehow, exposing the
possibility to cause some stress on Skype's servers as FrojoS mentions.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_switched_telephone_netwo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_switched_telephone_network)

------
orbitingpluto
For some reason I have a SkypeOut subscription. It tends to get used only when
the SO is simultaneously making long distance calls on the landline.

Skype quality is usually attrocious. But yesterday I had my first crystal
clear call in over two years. It only cost about $72 to finally get that!

------
rundmc
Page Not Found [https://secure.skype.com/account/buy/packages/company-
alloca...](https://secure.skype.com/account/buy/packages/company-allocated)

Have they changed their mind or they won't offer it to anyone that uses skype
manager...?

------
cerebrum
What would be safer here? Paying PayPal or credit card, assuming there is some
kind of data leak?

------
beaker52
A quick piece of eye catching news to bury the security flaw that came out
yesterday!

------
wildmXranat
>Trial must be redeemed by 15/11/2012. Offer available only to existing Skype
users who have been registered with Skype more than 29 days. To qualify for
the offer

Is that some sort of joke ?

------
benregenspan
And all you have to do to get them is log into someone else's account!

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ireadzalot
Their definition of "worldwide" only includes 40 countries.

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bart42_0
Just another way to collect credit card numbers

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maheshgattani
No thank you, i would not share my credit card info for this.

