The Matzav Phone Service – I investigate
Matzav.com has recently begun advertising VoIP phone service in the Yated, with whom they seem to be very tight with. (See the Yated book ads on Matzav’s website.)
Aside from some misleading statements like “more than 90% of businesses have switched to VoIP” and that you get higher, “digital quality” sound, the pricing is totally absurd at $30.00.
I found no mention anywhere online fore the 90% claim. And if anything, VoIP can many time have latency issues which are rarely found in land-line connections, which are more reliable, btw.
Anyway, knowing that Matzav is no phone company, I set about finding out which company they are acting as affiliates. (Also to see if they offer a better price than Matzav.)
At my first try on the http://matzavphone.com website, I hit upon this gem: A link to another website for account information. Clicking that link take you to a page on www.myaccountcenter.net, which I correctly assumed was the page for the original provider.
(Interestingly, once you click the link above it creates a browser cookie which remembers that you’re a Matzav customer even if you navigate to another page in the website.)
A Google search on that domain told me that many others do the same like Matzav and that the providor does a good job hiding their identity.
Now I set about finding the owner for that domain. A quick whois checkup yielded no results. An address in Portugal which has no results in Google.
Stuck? Not yet. I went along to check which IP address the website was hosted on and whoa!, look what I found!
CustName: Net2Phone Inc.
Address: 298 State St.
City: Hackensack
StateProv: NJ
PostalCode: 07601
Country: US
RegDate: 2000-08-12
Updated: 2000-08-12
We know know that the provider is called Net2Phone. A quick Google search reveals the following.
They are now a subsidiary of IDT. And they have a website. Duh.
Interestingly, I wonder what you make of some user reviews on this sham of a company. Aha.
What did they say? Digital Quality. Yeah right.
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