Nowadays we live in a connected world where not having a phone or a phone number is considered a very strange occurrence, however, our personal lives are getting more and more invaded by technology designed to keep us busy while we supply precious data.
Spam calls, scam calls, and overall advertising over the phone is such a common occurrence that giving your phone number for anything nowadays comes with the risk of ending up on a spammer’s call list.
If you’ve ever been called by “Microsoft Support” or “IRS” or other such scams from India before, you know what I am talking about.
Every time you sign up for a website that requires your phone number under the guise of “Second Factor Authentication” or “Confirming you are human”, you risk having your phone number being sold to scammers for good money.
What can you do to prevent phone scams?
Simple. Get a secondary burner phone number and give it every time you need to sign up for junk. Need to sign in for a website you only care about once? Give them the burner number.
Need to talk to a possible customer from across the globe but don’t wanna give them your real personal phone number? Give them the burner.
Having a burner phone number helps you keep your real SIM Card phone number safe and secure. You can give your real number to your friends and family, while the rest of the people get the burner.
The best part is that they may not even notice because the phone numbers don’t look different than one a normal carrier would issue.
How does Dingtone work?
Dingtone’s phone numbers are VoIP numbers, which means their service allows you to call over the internet. You can generate yourself a brand new phone number in any country you want, and as long as you renew it, you can keep it for as long as you wish.
Not only you can have a secondary phone number thanks to Dingtone, but you can have as many numbers as you want. You can have one for each country if that’s what you need or want. There’s no limitation to only having one secondary number.
Dingtone phone numbers can be easily suspended and removed with a press of a button inside the application, so if one of your numbers becomes targeted by too much spam, you can just suspend it and get a new one in seconds.
How can you get Dingtone credits?
Aside from being able to buy credits in packs directly from the Dingtone app, you can also earn free credits by watching ads or by checking in daily in the app.
You also get some free credits when you invite your friends to Dingtone or when you share the app on social media.
It’s the same model many iOS and Android games use to let you earn in-game currencies, only this time you earn credit you can use to call and send SMS via Dingtone.
If you don’t wanna watch ads to get credits, however, they do have solid packs you can buy which contain a lot of credits. Right now these packs are as follows:
- 200 Credits – $4.99
- 500 Credits – $11.99
- 1000 Credits – $20.99
For reference, a call to the United States is taxed at 0.9 credits/minute, while a call to the United Kingdom is taxed at 1 credit/minute. You can find the full rates list for all countries here.
Overall, with the 200 credits pack which costs $4.99 you’d be able to call to the United States for a total of 200 minutes which is about 3 and a half hours. This is pretty cheap considering it’s an international call.
Remember, Dingtone-to-Dingtone calls are free, even internationally! So if your friends use Dingtone too, you won’t be taxed at all!
After getting a United States phone number on the Dingtone app, if you decide to switch, you can port the number to other mobile phone carriers such as Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint. So even if you decide to stop using Dingtone someday, you can keep your number under a new carrier.
It’s important to mention that the Dingtone application is available on both iOS and Android, so if you switch from one phone to another it would not be an issue at all.
The conference calls are also supported by Dingtone. You can create conference calls with up to 1000 callers, with international dial-in numbers. You can create an instant meeting or schedule one. Scheduled meetings also have the option to automatically remind the attendees about the meeting via SMS or email.
You can also set up a voicemail and SMS auto-reply for your Dingtone phone numbers so that you can respond to your customers even when you’re not at your desk.
If you want to display your phone number to the people you call, you can link it in the Dingtone app as well.
Dingtone app in statistics
According to Dingtone, they were established in 2012, and in 2019 the service was being used by 100 million people. It also has a lot of great reviews on AppStore, with most bad reviews being careless users who forgot to renew their number and had it expire.
Dingtone Statistics
Keep in mind that expired phone numbers that you don’t renew can be given to someone else at some point, just like on any other carrier, so please don’t use these numbers for very sensitive data like signing up for a bank account, etc.
