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A girl has been hit with a staggering £3,800 mobile phone bill, just by using Facebook.
The Metro ran a story that said Casey Snook was sending updates to friends as she enjoyed a holiday in the Big Apple. She was visiting landmarks such as The Empire State Building, Times Square and Central Park in New York City.
The report said that she was unaware her photo posts were running up data roaming charges. That was until her father's bank account was sucked dry, going overdrawn.
Her mother Kate, 43 isn't happy with situation and is accusing Orange of ‘extortion'. Of course getting the story published in the Metro paper has helped raise the profile of ridiculous roaming charges.
Orange said they sent a text message to Casey to tell her that she had exceeded her internet data limit and that her bill had increased from £50 a month to £320. Orange said they also barred her from sending more texts and making more calls. The didn't block data roaming however. They say Casey clicked a ‘yes' button when asked if she wanted to keep the data option enabled.
The girl is denying the claims. The family claim they don't understand what a data cap is and that many teenagers wouldn't either. She added “I don’t understand why another message wasn’t sent after the one that said the bill had reached £320. Why wasn’t one sent at £500 or £1,000?” If she was sent one at £1,000 would she have read it anyway?
Orange said “All customers have protections in place which limits their charges to £49 for a set amount of data.
‘In this instance, the customer received numerous text alerts which updated her on the roaming costs for America. She actively opted out of our roaming data cap to continue to use data, effectively removing the in-built protection from large data roaming bills.”
Kitguru says: I wonder what the father thought when he checked his bank details that week.
How moronic.
Orange are well within their rights to charge (almost) however much they want for data roaming and exceeding usage caps. Check the ‘fair usage’ and ‘overseas use’ clauses in your phone contract.
And the poor diddums don’t know what a data cap is. Obviously the logic train didn’t stop at their station.
I wonder how much they got paid for their ridiculous story.
I hope Orange don’t let up.
On a more helpful note; if you go away and need to use your phone, slip a local pay and go sim in (sometimes called a pre-paid mobile card). Then you will get local rates and know how much you’re spending.
If you go abroad a lot get an international sim from Lyca Mobile.
While I hate the way phone companies do business, and there is surely no way for them to justify the amount of these charges, this seems like a case of buyer beware if I’ve ever seen one.
It’s a combination of corporate greed, the public’s entitlement syndrome, and society’s cheating natural selection all coming together in a perfect storm.
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