beware MoneyGram

I wanted to send some money to my sister, and she suggested MoneyGram as she'd used it before without a problem. She'd used it at a CVS location to send money to someone. I checked the MoneyGram website to see what the fee would be, and it showed $11.50. That sounded reasonable; less than a wire transfer at least. The website also indicated that you could do transfers directly via the website, instead of going in person to one of their locations like CVS. The website also showed that you could do transfers from your bank account as opposed to only from a credit/debit card. Using a credit card would result in extra cash advance fees, which would be bad. It wasn't clear if a debit card would result in such a charge or not, so I wanted to avoid that too.

So this evening, I go to their website again, enter my bank account info, and go to do the transfer. But then it showed the fee as $89.99 - almost 12% of the amount being sent!!!! Their online fee is much higher than their physical location fee. Not only that, but the option for selecting my bank account was disabled with a message "Note: Bank Account is unavailable for U.S. to U.S. sends." Why didn't they say that in the first place, before I entered my bank data!? Their "Learn More" page only says "You can either pay with your credit or debit card, or directly from your bank account" - it doesn't list any such restriction.

So I left the MoneyGram site and instead did a direct transfer via my bank's website, with NO fee at all. (which sort of surprised me, or I would have selected that option to begin with.)