If you live in New England, you’ve probably noticed that your local phone company isn’t called Verizon anymore; now it’s FairPoint. And if you haven’t already, then soon you will likely receive new FairPoint calling cards.

But calling cards issued by your local phone company have a serious problem.

In the case of FairPoint, you could be charged as much as 75 cents per minute to use the card, and that’s before the payphone access charge. And given the abundance of prepaid calling cards which have rates as little as one cent per minute, that seems a bit insane.

FairPoint officials said the new calling cards were issued to approximately 400,000 customers in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, to replace Verizon calling cards as part of the corporate transition expected to be completed in November.

“When we do the changeover, those [Verizon] cards will go away,” FairPoint spokesman Jeff Nevins said Thursday. “We didn’t want people to be caught without a card. The last thing we wanted was someone holding on to their old Verizon calling card … to find out their card had been canceled.” — Bangor Daily News

Phone company calling cards differ from prepaid cards in that charges billed to the card appear on your regular telephone company bill. In addition, the cards can be used from virtually anywhere in the U.S. simply by dialing the operator. While you can call the 800 number printed on the card to make a call, you don’t have to.

Both local and long distance companies have been offering these cards to their customers for decades now, though only in the last 10 years or so have the rates on them begun to skyrocket, even as prepaid calling cards have emerged and their rates have steadily dropped. Frequent users can get lower rates by signing up for a calling card plan with the phone company that issued the card, but even the lowest card rates offered are higher than most prepaid cards.

I recommend that if you receive these cards from your local phone company that you first call the company to have the card numbers deactivated, so that someone can’t steal or guess the number and use it without your knowledge, before you destroy the cards. Then, if you feel you need to have a calling card around in case of some emergency, go pick one up at the corner store.