All Free Calls. Seriously.

When Josh passed this little nugget of goodness on to me this morning, I thought it was too good to be true. For the cost of a call to Iowa, you can make phone calls to a bunch of countries around the world using AllFreeCalls.net. The list of available countries is pretty large, and is supposedly set to expand in the near future. According to the folks at TechCrunch, this is how it works: the founder of the service established a phone company in the great (corn laden) state of Iowa, which is apparently the only state in the Union taking advantage of an FCC ‘kickback scheme’ that gives telephone companies a portion of the fees arising out of every single inbound call to an Iowa number. When you dial AllFreeCalls’ number, some of the long distance fees you pay to call Iowa go to the company. The key is that these ‘kickbacks’ are sufficient to, on average, more than cover the international outbound calling fees. Complicated? Yes; but who cares? You can make free calls overseas people!

Via TechCrunch