McCollum
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Legal Newsline) - Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum reached a bit of a personal milestone Thursday, settling with his 10th prepaid calling card company.
Touch-Tel Partners will cease any deceptive advertising, provide all the minutes it advertises and submit to three years of auditing by McCollum's office. The settlement closely follows nine others reached in June.
Touch-Tel must also pay $125,000 for investigative costs and future enforcement efforts. The first nine companies to settle were: IDT America, Inc.; Union Telecom Alliance; Total Call International, Inc.; Blackstone Calling Card, Inc.; CVT Prepaid Solutions, Inc.; Dollar Phone Enterprise, Inc.; STi Prepaid, LLC; Alternatel, Inc.; and Cristel Telecommunications, LLC.
Those companies agreed to provide more than $1 million to McCollum.
McCollum's investigation began in July 2007 after he received more than 200 complaints about the calling card industry.
Those complaints ranged from hidden fees to false advertising that claimed "unlimited minutes."
Specifically, Touch-Tel was rounding up call times to the nearest three-minute increment, McCollum said. He added that one poster had a fees and surcharges disclaimer printed only in English despite the rest of it containing all Spanish.
From Legal Newsline: Reach John O'Brien by e-mail at john@legalnewsline.com.