Gafachi.com provides VOIP (Voice Over IP) services (DID origination and SIP termination) that work great with Asterisk PBX. That means you can use your regular Internet connection for phone traffic for about 1.5 cents a minutes anywhere in the US 48 and Canada. Toll Free incoming numbers cost 2.00 a month and 1.7 cents a minute. Gafachi’s international rates are really inexpensive too.

Gafachi’s service is a bit different in that you pay for what you use rather than comitting to a monthly usage like you do at Voxitas or Broadvox. There are no upfront fees aside from 2.00 a month for DID origination, and Gafachi even gave us a $2.00 credit for testing our setup– which, gave us about 2 hours of talk time for free. However, when we went to make a payment to fill up our account we had some difficulty with their credit card payment system and their Paypal payment system.

Credit card payments for prepaid minutes are only accepted if your credit card is “Verified by Visa” or has a “Mastercard Secure Code” associated with your account. Because we are a business and our cards are bank issued business cards we are not eligible for either program. So while these programs are meant to reduce online credit card fraud (VOIP phone service must be rampant with fraud) there are still considerable problems in their implementations.

For instance, as Pascal Meunier states in his blog, “The Visa program also enables a new kind of attack against credit cards. If criminals get their hands on your last 4 SSN digits (or if they guess it, it’s only 9999 brute force attempts) and your credit card number, they could register it themselves, denying you its use! The motivation for this attack wouldn’t necessarily be financial gain, but causing you grief. I also bet that you will have a harder time proving that fraud occurred, and may get stuck with any charges made by the criminals.”

So while this ineligibility may inconvenience us, really it might be a security blessing in disguise since our business’ federal EIN (the equivelant of a SS#) is readily available to the public. Luckily though for us, Gafachi is willing to waive their “Verified by Visa” requirement if you can prove your physical address. Since this takes time through the US postal service (Gafachi mails your a letter with a secret code in it) and we needed minutes ASAP, we tried to pay with Paypal where we are a verified business account with a verified physical address already on file. But, after making several attempts at sending Gafachi money through Paypal that were refunded we were really stumped. “Why don’t they want our money??” I wondered.

After a quick phone call that was answered in person at Gafachi, the reason for the rejection was explained. When we were sending the money through Paypal, we were selecting that we were paying for a “Service” rather than for a “Product” (duh!). Once we made the payment (making sure to note the name on our account) and selected “Product” Gafachi was able to credit our account while I was still on the phone. Now we have enough hours of phone service to last us probably two months for 1/4 the price we were paying for a wholesale account ($100/mo commit + LD minute charges) at Voxitas.