I just saw this story pop up in my RSS feeds and couldn’t believe what I was reading. Basically a company was setup in Iowa and through some backward loophole/kickback scheme, inbound calls to Iowa generate money from the government for the Telco owner. And, on average, the kickback is more than enough to cover the cost of the international phone calls.
More about the story here, here and here.
This is nothing else than Futurephone, a weird Iowa toll number that costs you at least 6 cents or more per minute. The state of Iowa, or better these bogus companies, take advantage of an FCC kickback supported by the US Universal Service Fund (USF), so the company generating the calls makes money out of the USF. I’m more than sure that this isn’t allowed to continue for long — that’s really not what the USF is for! Don’t get diddled by these services!