I sent an e-mail to customer service regarding my recharge question and recieved a reply within 24 hours.

Regarding recharging: I could send a western union transfer to a private person in Beirut :eek:. As soon as they recieve the transfer, they promise to credit my hop card. Oh well, I knew the headquarter was in Beirut, but still... I'm just going to use my remaining balance, but it's a pity as I liked both the rates and the Monaco prefix.

Regarding the termination of the service, here's the quote from their e-mail:

well, maybe the dispute is about the +377 on a Ghana simcard...

Here is the website if you still want to get a HOP reload.

http://www.valuesphere.com/intouchsm...s/rldcntr.html

Hmm, why? I suppose it may be rather something about weakness of the US dollar. Raising rates and/or making debiting worse than 1/1 wouldn't look very attractive :-P

Why? Because a lot of competitors didn't like that agreement... anyway, the dollar is another trouble you're right! Anyway it's a pity :(

Here I thought with all the trouble with the Manx sim that Hop would stand alone. Still working
for as long as we needed it. I was wrong it is a pity as it did as Stu pointed out that it had the best rates in the U.S.

Gone
 

My Hop card appears to no longer work. Calls to it result in a reorder tone (fast busy) and it will not register on AT&T or T-Mobile. What a waste.

Whatever the reason for these companies going out of business - it's pushing me further away from the prepaid market. My main interest in prepaid is to have one number wherever I travel, cost is probably the fourth most important factor to me (behind quality of service, and number of countries). I guess maybe I don't mind paying $4/min for a phone call - maybe that's better than losing an investment with no course to recoup costs. It's kind of like a slap in the face. Anyway that's probably a topic for another thread.

Good-bye Hop.

I know. Unfortunately, we as consumers do not have much protection. The most we can do is to not topup at all until it's time to use the card, and even so, to topup with the minimum possible. At least that may reduce the loss incurred when they go belly up!

I talked to my source at hop. He states that you can use the phone to call out until April. He did not give a date, but that is better than the end of Feb. like it was planed. It looks like I will still lose money. I'm with bones-boy I think I had it with international cards.

I'm sorry I don't understand what your point is. If you don't mind to pay $4/min (or least the price is not the most impoartant factor to you) why don't you just use roaming with your US SIM? AFAIK both ATT and T-Mo charge about $1, not 4 per minute in roaming and you have one number (a US number, not foreign one, which the Americans wouldn't like to call).