The wireless industry association on Monday unveiled a new set of voluntary industry standards designed to help customers avoid “bill shock,” the financial and emotional trouble that comes with receiving an unexpectedly high cell phone bill for some extranormal usage. But the new standards were too late to prevent a Florida man from racking up a $201,000 bill from T-Mobile.
As WSVN 7 News reported Monday (h/t: The Consumerist), the man, college student Shamir, was born deaf. Still, his older sister, Celina Aarons, wanted him to stay in touch via text, so she bought him a phone and put it on her plan, totaling $175 a month.
But when Shamir traveled to Canada, he neglected to turn off his data roaming, “Texting over 2,000 times and using the phone to download videos. Bringing this charge for $1,800. This one for $1,300 this one for $2,500. On and on and on.”
Finally, when the monthly bill got back to Aarons, the total charge was an astronomical $201,005.44.
That said, T-Mobile did exactly what the new anti-bill shock standards stipulate, although those don’t go into effect until 2012. The company texted Shamir on four separate occasions with his alerts informing him that his new roaming rate was $10 per megabyte of data transmitted.
Still, Aarons said she thought that T-Mobile should have contacted her, the primary account holder, when the additional charges began racking up. The new regulations, though, don’t stipulate this.
After WSVN 7 contacted T-Mobile, the company agreed to slash the bill by a factor of nearly 10, down to $2,500 and gave her six months to pay it off, a huge relief to be sure, but still not as good as avoiding those charges in the first place. And if text warnings didn’t do it for Shamir in the first place, it’s unclear what good they’ll do when all the carriers begin offering them to all customers next year.
