T-Mobile customer gets hit with $201,000 mobile bill

Have you ever been hit with a high phone bill? Then you will probably have some pity for the woman in Florida who received a 43 page T-Mobile phone bill for $201,000. According to reports, the bill wasn't her own fault, but she was left dealing with the aftermath.

DigitalTrends reported on the story, which certainly gave me the shivers this morning. My last phone bill was £50 and that was bad enough. According to the news, her deaf brother Shamir racked up the data by downloading a lot of web video to drive the bill to $200k. He was abroad at the time.

The article states that T-Mobile in America charge $10 for every 1MB of data downloaded when abroad. Doing some maths calculations would point to over 20,000 MB of data downloaded by Shamir. A heck of a lot of data over the course of a month.

Apparently T-Mobile did text Shamir various price warnings at $50, $100, $200 and $500 limits. We still can't believe they didn't block the phone after $1,000 without user intervention claiming that it was fine to keep charging for data.

Celina Aarons obviously couldn't pay the bill, so she got in touch with a local television news network. T-Mobile reduced the bill to $2,500 and gave her six months to clear it. She was normally paying around $175 a month so we are surprised that an automated system in the company didn't flag the growing bill, long before it hit the final total.

Kitguru says: Get a television crew involved and normally companies are unwilling to look ruthless. It worked in this case.

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