Tips and advice about collecting phone cards

With a litle help from Svenska Telekortsamlarnas Förening, Tröskvägen 17, 175 45 Järfälla.. The text below is an excerpt from their series Telekortsskolan from their member publication KortNytt med KortFakta.

Phone cards can be unused or used. For collectors, the quality of the card should be the deciding factor. A used card that is clean and unscratched is better than an unused card that is scratched and dirty. However, it can be hard to find certain high-gloss cards without scratches.
Just as with stamp collecting, you can collect all the cards from one country or region, though that can get expensive in the long run. Instead, it is becoming more common to collect motifs, such as sports, cars, nature and so on, depending on the collector's personal interests. Overseas, there is a lot of interest in motifs related to Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Disney. There are even special catalogues for Coca-Cola cards.

Swedish phone cards can be divided into public cards and PR cards. Public cards are available for purchase by the public in kiosks and stores. PR cards are bought by companies as gifts to customers or to use in a promotional campaigns.

Equipment

As a collector, you may need some equipment. First, there is a variety of different albums and plastic pockets to hold your card collection. Remember that the plastic must not emit any gases that can destroy the cards. Ask your dealer for advice.
A magnifying glass, preferably one with a light, will come in handy for inspecting cards. Dirty cards can be cleaned with a mild soap and water solution. Cleaning must be done carefully, since numbers printed with inkjet printers disappear easily. Oxidisation can be easily removed from contacts with a common rubber eraser; some dealers also sell cleaning fluids.
Telia sells a card reader that can be used to read the number of calling units left on the card and the serial number of the chip in hexadecimal numbers. The hexadecimal number can be translated to a decimal number with a calculator or a spreadsheet program like Excel. Decimal numbers are base 10, hexadecimal numbers are base 16.

Good to know - colour variations, defects and counterfeits

During printing of the cards, one colour of ink may run out and cause a colour variation, but you should be careful with colour variations since the colours on the cards fade easily in the sun. Certain colours, red for example, fade faster than others. Some printing techniques result in different light-sensitive colours.
For various reasons, a card can go wrong in the manufacturing process so that e.g. the contact module ends up on the wrong side of the card. That particular defect is very rare. A more common defect is for the printed batch or control number to end up in the wrong place.
Unfortunately, counterfeiting also occurs. The contact module on a card can be switched for one that isn't normally found on that particular card. To determine whether the contact module has been switched, you can check with a magnifying glass and the card reader. The magnifying glass will reveal any glue, scratches or other deviations around the contact and the card reader will tell you whether the number of calling units is correct or if the serial number of the chip fits in the series with the other cards.
If the card reader shows "Err" (error) on the display, you almost certainly have a counterfeit on your hands.