Data Source: Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates, and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry and Collect2Card website. (Graph: Peter Wagner, 2015)

This graph originally appeared in Comments re: Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking ¶¶ 98-102, single call programs.

Our report, Please Deposit All Your Money found that 38% of every dollar consumers spend with a typical Global Tel*Link account goes to fees for having, funding and closing their account. That’s a $400million/year outrage. But with Global Tel*Link’s Collect2Card™ program, it’s even worse: 88% of the cost of each $14.99 call goes to “fees”. (We’d like to do a similar analysis of Global Tel*Link’s Collect2Phone™ service, but to our knowledge neither Global Tel*Link nor its competitors offer a breakdown of “cost” vs. “fees” for calls charged as premium text messages.)