People in prison have restrictions on how they can make calls. They usually can only make outgoing collect calls and are limited to 15 minutes. These calls can cost up to $20 or more for a 15 minute call! This is very expensive and usually the person in prison has no other choice. Until now.
Diamondcard offers local personal numbers/DID's that can be used for forwarding of these calls. The person in prison can make a collect call to the personal number which is then forwarded to the friend or family member he/she is trying to call. The savings is about 75%!
1. Signup for a Diamondcard account. During signup you need to buy a personal phone number/DID that is located in the SAME STATE as the prison the call is being made from. For example, if the prison is in Farmington, Utah you can buy a personal phone number anywhere in Utah. Salt Lake City (801) will work fine.
If you did not buy a personal phone during signup you can buy one after you already have an account. Login to your account and click on "online shop". Then buy your personal phone number.
2. After you buy your personal phone number login to your account and click "personal #'s" in the Telephony section of your Diamondcard admin center. This page is where you will find your personal phone number and configure it's forwarding. If you are forwarding to a USA number you need to enter it as "15615551212" The 1 in front is the USA country code. If you do not enter the 1 in front the call will not be forwarded properly.
Once you know what personal phone number has been allocated to your account you need to go to step 3. For this example, let's say your number is 18015551212.
3. Go to Correctional Billing Services Web Site (CBS). You need to call them up to create a new account. Their number is 1-800 844 6591. Make sure you give them your new personal number during the signup process. This will activate the number and allow the person in prison to make a collect call to your personal number.
After you have done these 4 steps the person in prison should be able to make collect calls to your personal number and the call will be forwarded directly to wherever you are.
In the above example a person in a Utah prison will make a collect call to your Utah personal number and then its forwarded to wherever you are. Let's say you are at your home in Florida. The Diamondcard cost of the call will be $0.022/min for the forwarding of the call. That's 2.2 cents per minute. VERY CHEAP! The total cost of the call is the Diamondcard cost + the CBS cost which is described below.
If the person in prison would make a collect call directly to your house in Florida (561) the CBS cost would be $3.95 for the first minute + $.89/min. = $17.30 without tax for 15 minutes. Total with tax is about $20. This amount is charged directly to your account with CBS.
If the person in prison makes a collect call to your new Diamondcard personal number in the 801 area code the CBS costs would be $3.15 FLAT FEE without tax for up to 15 minutes. This amount is charged directly to your account with CBS. The good news is that it's much cheaper to call an in state number than an out of state number. This is where Diamondcard comes in. We provide the in state number even though you are out of state! :)
You can see from this example you save approximately $75%. Approximately $4 instead of $20 cost from CBS + a negligible $0.33 (15 minutes X $0.022/min) cost from Diamondcard. BIG SAVINGS!
We have only analyzed the CBS web site and system for this process. There may be other companies that provide similar telecom services to prisons in the USA. If you encounter another service that needs a different type of configuration to get the forwarding working please let us know.
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