Extra Charge for Cash

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Story Published: Jun 11, 2008 at 5:30 PM MST

Story Updated: Nov 20, 2008 at 9:31 PM MST

By Rick Montañez

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Here's something to think about, if you pay your cell phone bill in cash, there's a good chance you might be paying more than you need to.

When you take your cash to pay your bill, some stores might charge you a few extra bucks for them to process that payment.

Because the stores that will charge you are not corporate owned stores, they're either affiliates or authorized agents.

Here's a way to save you some cash next time you go into your cell phone provider to pay your bill, don't pay in cash. But, if you do,make sure the store you're going to is corporate owned.

We see these stores all over town, but most of them in east Idaho are only affiliates or authorized agents, meaning, they aren't a direct link to the corporation.

At many places, like Sprint, where the closest corporate owned store is in Twin Falls, here in East Idaho, they'll charge you to pay in cash. The charge is usually around $5, but the first time you do it, you have to pay a $2.12 sign up fee.

Add that up, its about 60 dollars a year, which we all know, is about the cost of one tank of gas.

The reason they can charge you, corporate makes them use a third party to get the money from the authorized agent to the actual company.

I checked around with different cell phone places in town, and found that most authorized agents will charge you, except T-Mobile, when I called their agent at best buy he said they don't accept payments, you can only pay at a T-Mobile owned store.

You can make your payment online with no additional charges and some companies even let you pay by dialing a code into your phone.

The odd part of this story, we're told a lot of people actually come into these stores to pay cash.

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