Know thyselfįiguring that this would be resolved quickly, I went to Skype’s support page and filled out the extremely lengthy form for proving one’s identity and waited two days. Skype failed to notify me in any way that my payment had failed-it simply locked my account and waited for me to call the company. A notification about the second one showed up not by text or e-mail but by postal mail, of all things, and I managed to miss it.īad on me for not spotting this back in May when it happened, but as it turns out, it wouldn’t have mattered. However, the fraud alert I got from the credit card company only showed the first charge. By annoying coincidence, my Skype account’s auto-renewal charge happened to occur within a few minutes of the fraudulent test charge-and both charges were blocked. A quick bit of testing showed that while I could make "normal" Skype calls to other Skype users, I couldn’t call out to regular phone numbers from Skype, and I couldn’t call my Skype phone number from anywhere else.Īfter some investigating, I found what was likely the cause of the problem: way back at the end of May, my credit card had been compromised, and I’d had to cancel the card and get a new one (I’m not sure where the compromise occurred, but the credit card company caught what it called a "test" charge at an online retailer and blocked it immediately). I did the interview with my cell on speakerphone so that I could record it with a handheld recorder and then went digging. Instead of ringing, the Skype client immediately disconnected with an error that said "Account blocked." The cause Until two weeks ago, when I went to make a Skype call to an interviewee’s cell phone. For about $60 a year, Skype gives me a phone number in my area code and the ability to make unlimited calls to and from it, and I’ve been paying that $60 a year and using Skype for six years without incident. I prefer it over Google Voice or Google Hangouts because it’s a much simpler tool to deal with, and damn near everyone already has a Skype account anyway. It’s far and away the easiest method by which to record phone interviews (using the Call Recorder plug-in).
Skype is a regular tool in my journalist toolkit.
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