International calling cards fly off the rack

For $2, she can call her sister in Guatemala for their weekly half-hour chat. For more loquacious relatives, Tovar buys a $5 phone card with more than an hour of talking time.
As Tennessee's foreign-born population has grown to nearly 200,000, the international calling card market has grown rapidly. Groceries that carry immigrants' favorite treats from home also hang colorful signs in the window to advertise the best price per minute on international calls. Some promise a 20-minute call to Egypt for $2, for instance, while others offer calls to Bangladesh for 6 cents a minute.
The cards bear names such as Guatemala Gol, a reference to the next World Cup tournament, or Cotorron, Spanish slang for talkative people. Customers buy cards specific to landlines or cell phones. Before dialing the number, they punch in an access code that tells the phone company the call is prepaid.
For Tovar, a native of Guatemala who became a U.S. citizen, the cards are 60 percent to 70 percent cheaper than using the local phone company's international long-distance service.
"I'll buy the best ones with the most amount of minutes," Tovar said. "This way I don't have to worry about a monthly bill. I have a lot of sisters to call."
Illegal immigrants sometimes are forced to use the cards because they don't have the identification needed for home phone lines.
Many American-born locals first heard about the cards after the shooting death of Malith Wiek, a Sudanese Lost Boy who worked as a custodian at Montgomery Bell Academy. He sold calling cards on the side to earn money for a trip home. His relatives say they don't know how he got into the phone card business, but they wonder if he was killed last month so someone could steal his supply.
The case remains unsolved.
Ajuang Ajuang, Weik's uncle, says his nephew used the cards to call home to Sudan and sold them to other local Africans. "It's the only way the African community can call back home," Ajuang said. "It's so expensive (otherwise). We all use it." The scramble for the international calling card market started in the late 1980s and early 1990s with some pitfalls, said Alfredo Polo, owner of Tele Discount in Atlanta. Polo's company distributes to stores in the Nashville area, plus locations in Alabama, Louisiana and the Carolinas.
"It first started with calling cards in Europe and then here," Polo said. "You saw a lot of people calling back home to Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The business really took off with little regulation, but it's more stable now."
As the market was getting established, fly-by-night operations advertised deep discounts but then sold worthless cards, or cards with only a few minutes on them. The government had to make sure companies offered disclaimers and listed all fees. More native-born Americans — those who travel and those with friends abroad —also are using calling cards, Polo said. Domestic and international long-distance cards are a $4 billion industry, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Recently, to make money off the increase in international calling cards sold in the U.S., foreign countries receiving the calls started charging their own fees, tacked onto the cards' price. Colombia has started charging; Honduras, after a coup, increased its rates.
Still, locals go to grocery stores to get their cards.
On Tuesday, Osmar Garcia stood behind the counter of La Vaquita, a Mexican market on Nolensville Pike, naming in quick succession the cards people buy based on their countries of origin. Guatemalans, Hondurans and Mexicans use a prepaid calling card called Domino. People from the Caribbean like a different one. All the cards hanging on the rack were $2 or $5.
Garcia uses calling cards every so often when his cell phone rates become too much.
"People would rather pay 7 cents a minute than the 25 cents the cell phone charges us," Garcia said. "It comes down to money and keeping in touch with family and friends."
source: tennessean.com