The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 16, 2007

Official News page 6


REAL LIFE NEWS: THE BIGGEST PHONE BILL IN THE WORLD

by Hazed

A Canadian man has just accidentally run up a mobile phone bill that must break some sort of record - it was for $85,000.

Piotr Staniaszek from Calgary recently decided to renew his wireless contract with Bell Mobility. To seal the deal they gave him a new cell phone. He quickly connected the phone to his PC and got online, downloading movies and lots of other bandwidth-hungry applications, assuming it would all be covered by his "unlimited mobile browsing plan".

Ouch - that was an expensive mistake to make, and the bad news arrived in the form of a phone bill for $60,000 to cover November's phone charges alone. When he rank Bell Mobility he was told the total had gone up to $85,000. Ouch again!

He says he shouldn't have to pay because he had no idea what he was doing wasn't covered. Bell says that when he downloaded the software that allowed him to use the mobile as a modem, a big warning would have come up to tell him there would be additional charges. They have made a "goodwill gesture" and reduced the bill to a mere $3,243 but still, Piotr is playing dumb and saying he's going to fight the charges because "nobody explained any of this to me."

While it sounds like he was extremely stupid, and doesn't deserve much sympathy, I have to wonder why the phone company allowed him to run up such a huge bill... didn't any alarm bells start ringing at all in their finance department? Surely nobody ever legitimately runs up a bill of that size - either it's a mistake, or the phone has been stolen.


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