Heard of Lycamobile? They are a mobile phone network in the UK and also worldwide. I have a phone in the UK with one of their sim cards in. It is actually a spare Samsung which I purchased unlocked for about £7 from Sainsbury’s a while back.
Why? Well Lyca offered a great way for me to ring my wife in the USA. Calls were only around 5 pence per minute, a lot cheaper than using the main networks so I slapped one of their free sim cards into the phone and away I went. Lots of calls to my baby without breaking the bank before I traveled to the USA myself.
All well and good and now that I am in the USA I noticed their offer to send a sim card to friends/family in the USA. This offer also applied for other countries too. It offered very cheap if not free calls between Lyca phones in the two countries. Brilliant I thought. I gave my mum the Samsung phone with Lyca’s sim card in it and aimed to get another Family and Friends sim card in the USA so we could enjoy cheap calls and also so my mum could call me easily in an emergency.
A waste of time.
I applied on behalf of my wife back in November (2013) and waited for the sim card to arrive. After a month I tried again … no response.
Next I contacted their customer services … no response. After several more fruitless emails to their customer complaints department, I finally gave up believing the whole offer to be a scam. Yes I did receive replies but in poor English and they had no satisfactory result.
I heard no more until last week when I received a sim card from them. It seems that my sim card has been putting its feet up in the Caribbean for a couple of months. It actually came to us in February (2014) via Montserrat, West Indies. I must admit that with the amount of snow and bitter cold we are experiencing here in Ohio I quite envy it. See the pictures below. The Merry Christmas greetings on the envelope I find to be a bit of a piss-take seeing as we are almost at Valentine’s Day now.
Oh … and the sim card? Absolutely no bloody use whatsoever. It is a UK sim card which does not work in the USA. I despair of Lycamobile’s customer service which has been … I was going to say appalling, but it has actually been non-existent. I had even re-sent our US address to them several times. Thank you so much Lycamobile for this entirely frustrating waste of time.
UPDATE.
Lycamobile finally sorted me out. They sent me the correct USA sim card which didn’t work in my phone but that wasn’t their fault. It turns out that my Samsung is not compatible here. Since then I have bought a cheap BLU phone and it works in that fine. Lycamobile even gave me a months free National Plan worth $16 as compensation. More power to you Lycamobile. 🙂
Stan M Rogers 