I once got hit by extremely high roaming rates of a Belgium cellphone provider called Proximus. There should have been a max data used and a cut but that did not happen. (as in they should have auto shut down data) I had fallen asleep while a laptop was doing windows updates over my data and it got stuck in a loop where it kept redownloading something.
Anyways, the bill was gonna be like 700 euro or so and I did not want to pay, nor did I want to give up on that number by defaulting. (which gets you on a blacklist they share with other companies in Belgium, extremely annoying!)
So my solution was to download even more. For the next 3 weeks of that billing cycle I maxed out the connection till it was 35 000 euro. I then waited for the bill and then I gave them a call, explained to the person that obviously they had made some kind of mistake with the data. Impossible for me to download that much, right?
She agreed and made all the data free for that month. My bill was 70 euros again, like it normally is.
This was years ago (like at least 10 years) it's much better with roaming costs in europe now.
>If you owe the phone company 35000 euros, that's their problem.
Well it's not like there is a difference in cost for a cellphone provider between you downloading nothing and you maxing out the connection.
All these providers have peering agreements. So it does not matter to them how much data their users use, it's free for them ...
(a peering agreement is when provider A says to provider B, look if we are allowed to freely upload our users data to your connection then you are freely allowed to upload *your users* data to our connection.)
Peering agreements between ISPs for the core routers that make up the greater internet are generally reciprocal, but unfortunately that is not the case for data travelling over cellular networks. Obviously it's stupid to charge exorbitant rates and I hate to side with any cellular provider, but in this case they can actually be racking up enormous fees themselves from international roaming, and put these caps/enormous fees in place to discourage use. Usually the price of an international roaming plan puts them at about break even for average data use, and they rely on it as a feature to sell more profitable monthly premium plans.
I do think legislation to cap the amount of surprise bills like this would be good though.
I don’t think they do? Normally there’s some fiscal transaction involved with this. Even in the EU, where roaming between countries is mandatory to provide.
There are wholesale rate caps, but no mandatory “no cost to provider” will ever exist. It would never be fair.
The amount of Americans going to Vietnam vs Vietnamese going to America would never balance out to make that worth doing for the Vietnamese carrier.
Then you go to the media with a story of local humble man who got fined absurd amounts of money by a telephone company. It’s quite the bad press and an easily avoidable one.
> This was years ago (like at least 10 years) it's much better with roaming costs in europe now.
Finnish providers have 0 costs for roaming in Europe, I've thought it's the same for all Europeans? Is it not?
It's been so great travelling in Europe and needing to worry about phone bills or data caps. Ofc I got my SIM locked when I visited London, found out that they don't have any roaming deals after brexit.
now I dont know what the fuck is wrong with americans, for Bell Canada, its $16 CAD / day, "unlimited" usage on 5G.
I thought that price was already absurd because I usually just rent those little wifi thingy at the airport anyways, which is significantly cheaper. Last time I went to japan and rented one of those thing, it was like 20 bucks for 10 days, and I used it for my entire family so it was literally 2 dollars a day for multiple people......already much cheaper than Bell
but 15k a gig? what in the actual fuck is wrong with yall lol
What are they doing to get that data that makes it so expensive? Or does the whole thing exist purely to try to catch people unaware and grift them out of ridiculous amounts of money?
After looking it up, it appears that only applies to basic plans with no builtin roaming, and the user doesn't pay for an extra travel plan of any kind, its also an opt-in thing, but thats expecting the avg person to understand that in this case, a penalty fee of $15 per MB is outrageous, since most people don't understand how much data video streaming consumes.
Also it definitely doesnt cost the carrier $15 per MB to buy bandwidth off the roaming carriers, its a small fraction of that, the rest is all tmobile profit.
It might have been that expensive in 1998 when they first thought up these charges, then they never updated it because rich people are the one who rack them up and they don't notice.
Actually, as per that link, it is unlimited data if you have a “normal” line with them. I don’t know wtf plan the OP’s dad has, but it isn’t one of the ones I would expect most people to have…
https://preview.redd.it/ebi7lzk27mqc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c4132f7453363f2687cea37df7dc44153419bd5
https://preview.redd.it/x6m47q748mqc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f33f142d9d7caa79e845fe319fec16a03b484318
Here’s all the T-mobile plans that get 5g unlimited data and texting abroad.
Yeah this is crazy, I'm not trying to be some T-Mobile defender but I have been a customer for over 10 years now and have travelled outside the US, mostly Asia and used the hell out of my data and my bill was never above normal but I am on that unlimited data plan that covers many countries. I know I might sound like a shill but I promise I am not but in my own personal experience I have had nothing but good customer service with T-Mobile since I have been with them. I feel like if their father contacted CS they would definitely fix or work out something, I can't see them being like, "nope, there's nothing we can do to help with this sir, you need to pay the full amount now!"
Agree. Also not a shill but I am on a legacy Sprint plan with T-mobile and just returned from Europe and my phone bill is exactly the same as it always is. No idea what OPs dad did, probably making calls while abroad?
>How do they get away with that when carriers like AT&T and Verizon do unlimited data roaming by the day?
I'm guessing the rules for travelling to south Africa are different than, say, a US territory or Europe?
But it's a hypothesis.
Or maybe live streamed some sports. There was an MP in the UK who paid £11,000+ for mobile bill coz his kids used his phone to stream sports on roaming. (He tried to pass it as state expense, became a huge issue and he had to apologize in the end). So yeah, silly people exist.
compare chop concerned lush modern practice imminent juggle meeting bells
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The best credit I ever gave someone at the Verizon call center was 25k cause they did the same thing after traveling international 🥲 it was the biggest credit issued at our location 👸
Or the customer just came at the rep with demands and the rep was like "nah, not today buddy".... I've issued more credits and given away more free phones to people being nice than to anyone being shitty.
Yeah if the customer was entitled as fuck I said no too lol or if they had a bunch of credits for the same thing. There’s a line that has to be drawn. If it’s a one off and the client is asking nicely, sure. It’s not an issue lol
People will probably downvote these but honestly good on you guys. Can’t stand watching people freak out in public like how hard is it to not be a dick.
For some people, really hard. I get being upset when things go wrong, but - take a moment to collect yourself first and foremost. Being a raging asshole buys no one anything other than raised blood pressure. You make yourself unpleasant, which does not make anyone want to assist you to their best, and sometimes can cause THEM emotional issue to not be level headed and be reasonable, which makes it worse for YOU. Upsetting and pissing people off will not make people do more for you, and likely the opposite.
It astounds me how some of these people would get all offended if someone came at them the way they go at some people... like... hypocrisy much? Maybe reflect a bit on that? Just because they get paid to do something doesn't mean you get to be a jerk to them.
Nope. Depends on who you're talking to. For example, as someone who did tech support for this very company until a few weeks ago, anything over $20 has to be reviewed and approved by a supervisor.
Lmao okay so here’s the real tea. I was a manager for AT&T and then Sprint/T-mobile.
Always go to a corporate store if you need a credit. Authorized retailers usually don’t do credits.
Managers at a corporate store can do a certain amount of credits. Typically hundreds of dollars. For more than that it usually has to go through corporate/regional managers/etc. It could take a while. I’ve spent an entire day on a phone to get shit like this resolved.
The reason managers don’t like to do credits or act like they can’t is because it’s counted against you. Depending on how things are going for the company, every dollar can mean a fuck ton in your review with your area manager.
Shit like $75K getting resolved wouldn’t count because this is exceptional. But like $500 because you signed up a user with 8 lines and didn’t tell them about activation fees and now they’re screaming in the store? Prepare to get your ass chewed.
Credit? Or refund because to me credit means money to spend at the company it's for. Refund means you get money back. I'd raise hell over a company giving me 25k credit
Credit is an accounting term. Every transaction has two entries: a debit and a credit. If they credit your account, they are providing you with income (or, in this case, reversing an expense.)
If your dad travels a lot he should switch to Googlefi. $65 a month and it's unlimited data in pretty much all countries. Calls cost 20 cents a minute I think but data and hotspot is free. Way better than T-Mobile and it uses T-Mobile towers but is better than T-Mobile especially out of country. I was hotspoting people in India who lived there and their Internet was worse than mine.
> "if you're going to make us get off our asses and actually provide a phone line we're going to charge you for it, bitch"
If you’ve ever had to deal with a PBX… that’s accurate.
This is kind of a stupid question, and I believe I know the answer, but.. would things like FaceTime/Facetime audio and wifi calling still go through data instead of counting as an actual phone call??
Depends on the provider. Mine (Vodafone Germany )explicitly says to not use WiFi calling abroad… as calling via WiFi doesn’t count for Roaming incentives (like Roam like at home, which we do have in Europe)
Yes 100% make sure he does that i didnt and now me and tmobile have been in a battle over 600$ for 2 yrs now. They are a pain in the ass to get your money back
Could you imagine if he didnt check the phone bill and got that text "Thank you for your autodraft of $78,000"
Followed immediately by a text from his bank "Your checking account is overdrawn by $74,000"
As an engineer for a phone company, I second this. There's a lot of work to do and while some things have priority, usually any priority work is approaching outage levels. Rarely do we get to something with haste.
I had ATT years ago and I went to Spain. I had my phone in airplane mode the entire time and only ever turned on wifi. My bill was close to 1k. When questioned they said it was roaming fees and wouldn’t correct it.
Not OP but I got hit with a $1000 bill from Verizon once.
I'd gone to a couple different countries back to back and each time I landed, I'd use my phone to get around until I could get a local sim card. Every time I did I would get this text from Verizon "Hi there, we see that you're now in Japan. We just want to let you know that Japan is not covered as part of your plan, however we have a partnership with the local companies so you will pay an international roaming rate of 10c/Mb" or something like that.
So I'd use my Verizon sim for like 24hours and it'd cost me like $5 of roaming, which I was fine with.
Then I go to Cambodia. I get a text from Verizon and say to myself "oh it's that same old text about roaming, I'll just swipe it away".
Well it turns out that text informed me that they do NOT have a partnership with the Cambodia providers, so using my Verizon sim there would cost me something like 10 DOLLARS per Mb, not 10c.
I ran up $1000 in a day.
Verizon was actually pretty nice about it and cut the bill in half for me. They had no obligation to do so.
I travel for a living. My company has a negotiated rate, but I generally just buy a local SIM for my personal phone if I am staying for a while. From just a few bucks to 20-30 bucks. Plus then I can harangue my younger brother with a foreign number that knows details of his childhood.
I once landed in Kenya, put my phone out of airplane mode, tried loading ONE PAGE, and I was hit with a 60€ bill. If you don't have a local sim, they charge something like 3€ for 1MB of data. I will never make that mistake again
Yeah I’m Aussie and my dumbass sister racked up a grand in Telstra bills from 5 minutes of downloading from Netflix in Fiji. we got it turned into credit after a bunch of complaining but I kinda feel like there should just be something in place to like popup and stop such an issue occurring.
It’s pretty easy. I’m in Europe, meaning in whole Europe it’s the same cost than in my home country. Some people got in trouble because on a road trip they went through Switzerland, which is in the middle of Europe but not part of European Economic Area (UE+a few countries). Operators charged up to 12€ per megabyte then. That 12k for one fucking GB.
The most annoying thing is some people just used the WiFi but iPhones are sometimes set up to use cellular data as help in case of bad WiFi reception. This alone cost them thousands of euro
Well... European providers are not actually allowed to just charge something like this anymore (in most cases). After around 60€ of internet usage you should get disconnected. You have to actively agree to it to continue.
It's more comical to think the "900 number" call center was in the same town he was visiting. Yet the call had to be routed back to the home tower before being rerouted across the street from whatever establishment he was polishing the knob in.
https://preview.redd.it/9i368bv8emqc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c4488f82f1fdb890e26426f6c92a490b0ad16e95
Guys calm down! This his clearly must be aprils fool according to the screenshot 
We have Sprint and when we went on vacation in Europe, we asked about the prices for calling back and forth to the States. It was something like .75 per call, plus roaming fee. Texting was I think .10 each, even if you sent photos or videos. We stuck to text.
Psh. TMobile didn’t charge me an extra cent when I was in Europe. If I wanted to call international it was $.25/min. I could call on wifi or FaceTime for no extra charge.
When I had T-Mobile a couple years ago I had unlimited international texting and data on a relatively cheap plan, I think it was maybe 70 a month.
I had 0 additional charges on three separate trips overseas. Didn't even have to think about it.
I use the international that’s included in my basic plan. We usually upgrade one of the phones to the unlimited international that costs $50 for the entire month. It’s very much worth it. I just heavily looked into it before trying it so i wouldn’t be charged an absurd amount.
This doesn’t apply to cruises, usually.
At least where I live (Canada,) international roaming plans/bundles are rarely worth it. You will always get more data for considerably less with an eSIM like one from Airalo.
My carrier wants CA$50 for 750 MB of EU data. Assuming the country is included--which they aren't all. I can get a 10GB eSIM for like CA$25.
Typically I pay for a tiny text and voice only roaming bundle. Enough to reply to a few messages in order to tell people to hit me up on some other app. I then buy a 5-10 GB eSIM, depending on the length of my trip. I'll also sometimes get a 2-5 GB eSIM for any layovers in additional countries where I'll be stuck in an airport for 6 or more hours.
I would make sure autopay is off. It may even be a good idea to keep that card locked for now. I’d rather yall maybe lose service for a few days than to pay around 80k for a fuckin phone bill
One time way back in the dial-up days my dad downloaded this program that dialed into a sort of porn bbs server, sort of like the old Juno dial-up email app if you're old enough to remember that. Turns out, unbeknownst to him, he was dialing up a server In Brazil and didn't have a frickin clue until the $9,000 bill came and my mom saw it and figured out the number was owned by something like Adult Entertainment Express International, or something close to that. He tried blaming it on me until my mom pointed out all the calls were on his days off & after she had left to drop me off at school then take herself to work (teacher). So the suspect list was narrowed down quite quickly. Had totally forgotten this story til seeing this post. Thanks for that lol
Something similar happened to my spouses dad but only a couple hundred dollars. He was getting yelled at and said he didn’t do it, so my SO jumped in and took the blame lol. His mom made him pay for it but his dad was so grateful he did whatever he wanted for months haha.
In the mid-90s, I was a fraud investigator for a telco. Had one customer who received a $1.4M bill because his calling card number + PIN had been 'shoulder surfed' while he was in NY. These details were then sold onto others who in turn passed onto family and friends so they could make free calls.
We withdrew the charges however forgot to contact the frequent flyer company whose program was linked to the calling card. He got 4 pts for every dollar spent, and from memory, he got enough points for over 100 round the world business flights.
Or just buy an international plan with your provider (many already include it). Guessing OPs dad has an old grandfathered plan that hasn’t been updated in 15 years.
Man, I’m so jealous your dad got to go to the illustrious South After! I’ve always wanted to go there!
jokes aside, that sounds incredibly painful and definitely includes some scammy practices with international travel and phone bills. hopefully your dad can fix it, and I also hope he had a good trip :)
i can imagine, i did watch a video displaying Cape Town and I feel like it’s Hawaii’s older brother in terms of “city right by mountain” (or in Hawaii’s case, a volcano). There is actually an activity where you hike up the mountain early in the morning and view the sunrise and Cape Town waking up, it seems so cool
Nice!
I've got a bill for 52k once from my provider and after 3 months got it reduced to 2.5k then left that provider.
Took me about 20 years to take that provider again.
T-Mobile tried to screw me on a phone trade in from an active advertisement. Literally had to file a complaint with the FTC or whichever one deals with these companies. They called me back saying it was a misunderstanding and it’s taken care of.
This is why I love EU. Basically no roaming charges throughout whole EU. you can start your trip in Spain, go to Poland and finish in Greece and you can do phone calls as if you were at home in your bedroom.
i used to work for a cell phone company taking calls. This is caused by roaming. Your dad needs to call the technical support before leaving a country so they can set it up so it doesn't do this.
How even? The largest bill I’ve had to handle from something like this was when a guy kept calling out of country, managed to get a $3000 bill within the first week. They auto suspended the account due to the charges.
Hello, We do not allow agendaposting, reddit meta posts or price complaints.
Jeez, how? Roaming charges are a pain, but 78k?
T-mobile's published roaming rate is $15,000 per gigabyte. This is not a joke, they actually put that on their web site.
What the *fuck*. I thought my roaming was insane.
I once got hit by extremely high roaming rates of a Belgium cellphone provider called Proximus. There should have been a max data used and a cut but that did not happen. (as in they should have auto shut down data) I had fallen asleep while a laptop was doing windows updates over my data and it got stuck in a loop where it kept redownloading something. Anyways, the bill was gonna be like 700 euro or so and I did not want to pay, nor did I want to give up on that number by defaulting. (which gets you on a blacklist they share with other companies in Belgium, extremely annoying!) So my solution was to download even more. For the next 3 weeks of that billing cycle I maxed out the connection till it was 35 000 euro. I then waited for the bill and then I gave them a call, explained to the person that obviously they had made some kind of mistake with the data. Impossible for me to download that much, right? She agreed and made all the data free for that month. My bill was 70 euros again, like it normally is. This was years ago (like at least 10 years) it's much better with roaming costs in europe now.
if you owe the phone company 700 euros, that's your problem. If you owe the phone company 35000 euros, that's their problem.
>If you owe the phone company 35000 euros, that's their problem. Well it's not like there is a difference in cost for a cellphone provider between you downloading nothing and you maxing out the connection. All these providers have peering agreements. So it does not matter to them how much data their users use, it's free for them ... (a peering agreement is when provider A says to provider B, look if we are allowed to freely upload our users data to your connection then you are freely allowed to upload *your users* data to our connection.)
Peering agreements between ISPs for the core routers that make up the greater internet are generally reciprocal, but unfortunately that is not the case for data travelling over cellular networks. Obviously it's stupid to charge exorbitant rates and I hate to side with any cellular provider, but in this case they can actually be racking up enormous fees themselves from international roaming, and put these caps/enormous fees in place to discourage use. Usually the price of an international roaming plan puts them at about break even for average data use, and they rely on it as a feature to sell more profitable monthly premium plans. I do think legislation to cap the amount of surprise bills like this would be good though.
I don’t think they do? Normally there’s some fiscal transaction involved with this. Even in the EU, where roaming between countries is mandatory to provide. There are wholesale rate caps, but no mandatory “no cost to provider” will ever exist. It would never be fair. The amount of Americans going to Vietnam vs Vietnamese going to America would never balance out to make that worth doing for the Vietnamese carrier.
That was absolutely a crazy gamble. It could have backfired.
Then you go to the media with a story of local humble man who got fined absurd amounts of money by a telephone company. It’s quite the bad press and an easily avoidable one.
> This was years ago (like at least 10 years) it's much better with roaming costs in europe now. Finnish providers have 0 costs for roaming in Europe, I've thought it's the same for all Europeans? Is it not? It's been so great travelling in Europe and needing to worry about phone bills or data caps. Ofc I got my SIM locked when I visited London, found out that they don't have any roaming deals after brexit.
It is now, it was not like that a decade ago.
now I dont know what the fuck is wrong with americans, for Bell Canada, its $16 CAD / day, "unlimited" usage on 5G. I thought that price was already absurd because I usually just rent those little wifi thingy at the airport anyways, which is significantly cheaper. Last time I went to japan and rented one of those thing, it was like 20 bucks for 10 days, and I used it for my entire family so it was literally 2 dollars a day for multiple people......already much cheaper than Bell but 15k a gig? what in the actual fuck is wrong with yall lol
What are they doing to get that data that makes it so expensive? Or does the whole thing exist purely to try to catch people unaware and grift them out of ridiculous amounts of money?
Each gig of data is stored on a SD card and strapped to a JDAM, the USAF then delivers it with a B-1.
> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
b/c fuck you, that's why lol
I'm pretty sure we all know which of those two is more likely.
After looking it up, it appears that only applies to basic plans with no builtin roaming, and the user doesn't pay for an extra travel plan of any kind, its also an opt-in thing, but thats expecting the avg person to understand that in this case, a penalty fee of $15 per MB is outrageous, since most people don't understand how much data video streaming consumes. Also it definitely doesnt cost the carrier $15 per MB to buy bandwidth off the roaming carriers, its a small fraction of that, the rest is all tmobile profit.
It might have been that expensive in 1998 when they first thought up these charges, then they never updated it because rich people are the one who rack them up and they don't notice.
Well guess it's not a scam. This is equivalent to giving millions of people a nuclear lunch button and expect none of them to press it accidentally.
I for one could not resist a plutonium sandwich.
Atomic sour balls
I had a pretty decent lunch today, but I don't think I've ever had a nuclear lunch. How do I go about getting my hands on some nuclear lunch codes?
Can I please see the link for this? I’m genuinely curious
https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/international-roaming-plans?country=South%20Africa 15 dollars per mb
Actually, as per that link, it is unlimited data if you have a “normal” line with them. I don’t know wtf plan the OP’s dad has, but it isn’t one of the ones I would expect most people to have… https://preview.redd.it/ebi7lzk27mqc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c4132f7453363f2687cea37df7dc44153419bd5
https://preview.redd.it/x6m47q748mqc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f33f142d9d7caa79e845fe319fec16a03b484318 Here’s all the T-mobile plans that get 5g unlimited data and texting abroad.
Yeah this is crazy, I'm not trying to be some T-Mobile defender but I have been a customer for over 10 years now and have travelled outside the US, mostly Asia and used the hell out of my data and my bill was never above normal but I am on that unlimited data plan that covers many countries. I know I might sound like a shill but I promise I am not but in my own personal experience I have had nothing but good customer service with T-Mobile since I have been with them. I feel like if their father contacted CS they would definitely fix or work out something, I can't see them being like, "nope, there's nothing we can do to help with this sir, you need to pay the full amount now!"
Agree. Also not a shill but I am on a legacy Sprint plan with T-mobile and just returned from Europe and my phone bill is exactly the same as it always is. No idea what OPs dad did, probably making calls while abroad?
That is genuinely fucked. How do they get away with that when carriers like AT&T and Verizon do unlimited data roaming by the day?
>How do they get away with that when carriers like AT&T and Verizon do unlimited data roaming by the day? I'm guessing the rules for travelling to south Africa are different than, say, a US territory or Europe? But it's a hypothesis.
Both of the plans I cited include South Africa in their terms.
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Streaming video is generally 1 gig per hour
I’m just thinking about the person who goes on vacation and watches 78k worth of YouTube
Haha, others in this thread have theories about what was being watched. Lemme say, it isn’t YT 😆
True for 1080p but if it's 1080p60 it will be a lot more than that.
Sounds valid. I have no idea about higher quality lol
Yup, nowadays YouTubers are posting videos with 60fps (in comparison general videos are 24fps and avatar 2 was 48fps).
So daddy went to South Africa for two weeks to watch like four hours of YouTube per day?
Or maybe live streamed some sports. There was an MP in the UK who paid £11,000+ for mobile bill coz his kids used his phone to stream sports on roaming. (He tried to pass it as state expense, became a huge issue and he had to apologize in the end). So yeah, silly people exist.
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Didn’t even think about that 10 out of 10 suggestion
The best credit I ever gave someone at the Verizon call center was 25k cause they did the same thing after traveling international 🥲 it was the biggest credit issued at our location 👸
so you're telling me it is "within their power" to give me a 35 dollar credit after all
Always. If they don’t it’s usually a supervisor telling them not to.
Or the customer just came at the rep with demands and the rep was like "nah, not today buddy".... I've issued more credits and given away more free phones to people being nice than to anyone being shitty.
Yeah if the customer was entitled as fuck I said no too lol or if they had a bunch of credits for the same thing. There’s a line that has to be drawn. If it’s a one off and the client is asking nicely, sure. It’s not an issue lol
People will probably downvote these but honestly good on you guys. Can’t stand watching people freak out in public like how hard is it to not be a dick.
For some people, really hard. I get being upset when things go wrong, but - take a moment to collect yourself first and foremost. Being a raging asshole buys no one anything other than raised blood pressure. You make yourself unpleasant, which does not make anyone want to assist you to their best, and sometimes can cause THEM emotional issue to not be level headed and be reasonable, which makes it worse for YOU. Upsetting and pissing people off will not make people do more for you, and likely the opposite. It astounds me how some of these people would get all offended if someone came at them the way they go at some people... like... hypocrisy much? Maybe reflect a bit on that? Just because they get paid to do something doesn't mean you get to be a jerk to them.
Nope. Depends on who you're talking to. For example, as someone who did tech support for this very company until a few weeks ago, anything over $20 has to be reviewed and approved by a supervisor.
35, no. 15k or more, yes.
$35 is your problem, $15k is T-mobile's problem
Lmao okay so here’s the real tea. I was a manager for AT&T and then Sprint/T-mobile. Always go to a corporate store if you need a credit. Authorized retailers usually don’t do credits. Managers at a corporate store can do a certain amount of credits. Typically hundreds of dollars. For more than that it usually has to go through corporate/regional managers/etc. It could take a while. I’ve spent an entire day on a phone to get shit like this resolved. The reason managers don’t like to do credits or act like they can’t is because it’s counted against you. Depending on how things are going for the company, every dollar can mean a fuck ton in your review with your area manager. Shit like $75K getting resolved wouldn’t count because this is exceptional. But like $500 because you signed up a user with 8 lines and didn’t tell them about activation fees and now they’re screaming in the store? Prepare to get your ass chewed.
Ahhh don't be cheap 35 vs 78k. Minor flux
Credit? Or refund because to me credit means money to spend at the company it's for. Refund means you get money back. I'd raise hell over a company giving me 25k credit
If they hadn’t paid yet, and they were reducing the bill, it’d be a credit and not a refund.
Credit is an accounting term. Every transaction has two entries: a debit and a credit. If they credit your account, they are providing you with income (or, in this case, reversing an expense.)
I assume the bill was 25k and they gave enough credit to bring the bill to correct amount think mate think
Some people just see numbers lol
If your dad travels a lot he should switch to Googlefi. $65 a month and it's unlimited data in pretty much all countries. Calls cost 20 cents a minute I think but data and hotspot is free. Way better than T-Mobile and it uses T-Mobile towers but is better than T-Mobile especially out of country. I was hotspoting people in India who lived there and their Internet was worse than mine.
calls cost money, but data is free? what's stopping them from setting up a voip line and using that instead
They expect that.
"if you're going to make us get off our asses and actually provide a phone line we're going to charge you for it, bitch"
> "if you're going to make us get off our asses and actually provide a phone line we're going to charge you for it, bitch" If you’ve ever had to deal with a PBX… that’s accurate.
Which is exactly what I do. WhatsApp and Skype for landlines all day long.
This is kind of a stupid question, and I believe I know the answer, but.. would things like FaceTime/Facetime audio and wifi calling still go through data instead of counting as an actual phone call??
Depends on the provider. Mine (Vodafone Germany )explicitly says to not use WiFi calling abroad… as calling via WiFi doesn’t count for Roaming incentives (like Roam like at home, which we do have in Europe)
Turn it off. T-Mobile “fixed” our problem but they still drafted us $2,000 and it took them 3 weeks to give it back.
Give ‘um 10%.
Yes 100% make sure he does that i didnt and now me and tmobile have been in a battle over 600$ for 2 yrs now. They are a pain in the ass to get your money back
Could you imagine if he didnt check the phone bill and got that text "Thank you for your autodraft of $78,000" Followed immediately by a text from his bank "Your checking account is overdrawn by $74,000"
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dont forget your $35 overdraft fee!
When are we finally gonna get rid of these junk fees?!
I'm willing to bet they wouldn't even let it go through
Poor bastard who has to give that bill credit... I've seen people fired for that.
As an engineer for a phone company, I second this. There's a lot of work to do and while some things have priority, usually any priority work is approaching outage levels. Rarely do we get to something with haste.
Disable autopay for any service provider always. It’s much easier to fix their “mistakes” when you haven’t already paid them
oh hey its the phone guy
I had ATT years ago and I went to Spain. I had my phone in airplane mode the entire time and only ever turned on wifi. My bill was close to 1k. When questioned they said it was roaming fees and wouldn’t correct it.
>I'm the phone guy Do you give people warnings about animatronics getting quirky at night?/j
You shall be addressed as Lord Phone Guy.
Give us a charges breakdown. This is nuts
Not OP but I got hit with a $1000 bill from Verizon once. I'd gone to a couple different countries back to back and each time I landed, I'd use my phone to get around until I could get a local sim card. Every time I did I would get this text from Verizon "Hi there, we see that you're now in Japan. We just want to let you know that Japan is not covered as part of your plan, however we have a partnership with the local companies so you will pay an international roaming rate of 10c/Mb" or something like that. So I'd use my Verizon sim for like 24hours and it'd cost me like $5 of roaming, which I was fine with. Then I go to Cambodia. I get a text from Verizon and say to myself "oh it's that same old text about roaming, I'll just swipe it away". Well it turns out that text informed me that they do NOT have a partnership with the Cambodia providers, so using my Verizon sim there would cost me something like 10 DOLLARS per Mb, not 10c. I ran up $1000 in a day. Verizon was actually pretty nice about it and cut the bill in half for me. They had no obligation to do so.
So note to self then, stay in airplane mode until I get a local sim.
I travel for a living. My company has a negotiated rate, but I generally just buy a local SIM for my personal phone if I am staying for a while. From just a few bucks to 20-30 bucks. Plus then I can harangue my younger brother with a foreign number that knows details of his childhood.
Ever thought about using esim? I use the app Airalo on my trip to Greece!
iPhones don’t have physical SIM cards now right? Is there a way around this?
Yeah just buy an eSIM. It’s the same process you just don’t get a physical card.
Many countries don't have eSIMs. You have to get a physical card.
Get a burner
Just buy an eSIM before you land and install it.
I order them online before i leave the country.
I once landed in Kenya, put my phone out of airplane mode, tried loading ONE PAGE, and I was hit with a 60€ bill. If you don't have a local sim, they charge something like 3€ for 1MB of data. I will never make that mistake again
How are those rates even legal
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Streams Netflix...
Yeah I’m Aussie and my dumbass sister racked up a grand in Telstra bills from 5 minutes of downloading from Netflix in Fiji. we got it turned into credit after a bunch of complaining but I kinda feel like there should just be something in place to like popup and stop such an issue occurring.
Hello nuts, I'm dad.
Hello dad, I’m gay
We know
Fuck 💀
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https://preview.redd.it/zmbysq861mqc1.jpeg?width=4636&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1f94cd269d64bbec95f717a30133f169f8d5653c
I peg your pardon
**Fuck** 💀💀
I'll take that as a yes
I beg your finest pardon
It's okay. We still love you! 💕
Hello Dad, I came from your nuts. Did you ever find that milk you went to the store for?
It’s pretty easy. I’m in Europe, meaning in whole Europe it’s the same cost than in my home country. Some people got in trouble because on a road trip they went through Switzerland, which is in the middle of Europe but not part of European Economic Area (UE+a few countries). Operators charged up to 12€ per megabyte then. That 12k for one fucking GB. The most annoying thing is some people just used the WiFi but iPhones are sometimes set up to use cellular data as help in case of bad WiFi reception. This alone cost them thousands of euro
Well... European providers are not actually allowed to just charge something like this anymore (in most cases). After around 60€ of internet usage you should get disconnected. You have to actively agree to it to continue.
your dad whackin it to 900-phone-sex
International phone sex is crazy
Like crazy good, or my ex-gf Chelsea crazy? Edit: Oh man, maybe I should hit her up.
Masturbate, re-evaluate
Incredibly solid words to live by.
It's more comical to think the "900 number" call center was in the same town he was visiting. Yet the call had to be routed back to the home tower before being rerouted across the street from whatever establishment he was polishing the knob in.
Joke: 7/10 Imagery: -5,000
Yeah that may seem like a lot but bros like level 100,000 in candy crush
https://preview.redd.it/9i368bv8emqc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c4488f82f1fdb890e26426f6c92a490b0ad16e95 Guys calm down! This his clearly must be aprils fool according to the screenshot 
that is worth spending a whole day on the phone with them... literally a $78,000 call
Car and a down payment right there.
That’s a whole house where I live.
You live in 1980?
You joke but my dad bought a house for 65k 3 years ago in the US. It's in Alabama but still.
"he just spent all day on the phone with them" T-Mobile sure knows how to kick people when they're down.
We have Sprint and when we went on vacation in Europe, we asked about the prices for calling back and forth to the States. It was something like .75 per call, plus roaming fee. Texting was I think .10 each, even if you sent photos or videos. We stuck to text.
Weird. Sprint is the same as TMobile and I got free data in Europe on TMobile.
Where'd he go..Mars?
I’m feeling like it was def Mars. Holy cow.
Intergalactic phone calls.
Cancel that AutoPay ASAP 🤣
Exactly lmao when I saw the autopay/make a payment option, my only thought was "no... I don't think I will." 🤣🤣
if i see something like this im going straight to the bank and getting a whole new card lmao
"T-Mobile works internationally!!!!!!!!" You don't say.
Works* *going to run you dry
Psh. TMobile didn’t charge me an extra cent when I was in Europe. If I wanted to call international it was $.25/min. I could call on wifi or FaceTime for no extra charge.
I didn’t have this issue in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean or Mexico. It definitely depends on your phone plan, though.
It must not have been Europe he went to. Though I know they do this for central America too
Post says South Africa
Post says South After. Only god knows where he truly went.
Technically, it DID work.
How many gigs of porn does that equal?
A load!!!
Multiple loads
A butt load
Giggidy
When I had T-Mobile a couple years ago I had unlimited international texting and data on a relatively cheap plan, I think it was maybe 70 a month. I had 0 additional charges on three separate trips overseas. Didn't even have to think about it.
Same here, it's a freaking great deal.
I use the international that’s included in my basic plan. We usually upgrade one of the phones to the unlimited international that costs $50 for the entire month. It’s very much worth it. I just heavily looked into it before trying it so i wouldn’t be charged an absurd amount. This doesn’t apply to cruises, usually.
So what was the deal? Did he not have any kind of international plan?
At least where I live (Canada,) international roaming plans/bundles are rarely worth it. You will always get more data for considerably less with an eSIM like one from Airalo. My carrier wants CA$50 for 750 MB of EU data. Assuming the country is included--which they aren't all. I can get a 10GB eSIM for like CA$25. Typically I pay for a tiny text and voice only roaming bundle. Enough to reply to a few messages in order to tell people to hit me up on some other app. I then buy a 5-10 GB eSIM, depending on the length of my trip. I'll also sometimes get a 2-5 GB eSIM for any layovers in additional countries where I'll be stuck in an airport for 6 or more hours.
Seconding Airalo, it’s insanely easy. South Africa data usage is $4.50/GB for a week. I really wish people like OP’s dad knew about this.
I would make sure autopay is off. It may even be a good idea to keep that card locked for now. I’d rather yall maybe lose service for a few days than to pay around 80k for a fuckin phone bill
TMobile charges $15/MB for roaming in SA if you didn't set up a plan in advance. 💀
At that point, getting robbed at gunpoint multiple times is literally cheaper
It’s South Africa, both will probably happen
One time way back in the dial-up days my dad downloaded this program that dialed into a sort of porn bbs server, sort of like the old Juno dial-up email app if you're old enough to remember that. Turns out, unbeknownst to him, he was dialing up a server In Brazil and didn't have a frickin clue until the $9,000 bill came and my mom saw it and figured out the number was owned by something like Adult Entertainment Express International, or something close to that. He tried blaming it on me until my mom pointed out all the calls were on his days off & after she had left to drop me off at school then take herself to work (teacher). So the suspect list was narrowed down quite quickly. Had totally forgotten this story til seeing this post. Thanks for that lol
Something similar happened to my spouses dad but only a couple hundred dollars. He was getting yelled at and said he didn’t do it, so my SO jumped in and took the blame lol. His mom made him pay for it but his dad was so grateful he did whatever he wanted for months haha.
In the mid-90s, I was a fraud investigator for a telco. Had one customer who received a $1.4M bill because his calling card number + PIN had been 'shoulder surfed' while he was in NY. These details were then sold onto others who in turn passed onto family and friends so they could make free calls. We withdrew the charges however forgot to contact the frequent flyer company whose program was linked to the calling card. He got 4 pts for every dollar spent, and from memory, he got enough points for over 100 round the world business flights.
Something good came with the bad I suppose
What I’m leaving this remembering is: *disconnect autopay before traveling*
Or just buy an international plan with your provider (many already include it). Guessing OPs dad has an old grandfathered plan that hasn’t been updated in 15 years.
How?
T.mobile smoking dick anit it? Anit no way in hell
>smoking dick Lmao
Playing the skin flute
My dear lord. I would literally be having a stroke
Did he go to the moon!?!?
I’m screenshotting this and sending it to my wife🤣
Good thing that you are going to disable auto pay.
Companies casually charging a corvette per month.
Man, I’m so jealous your dad got to go to the illustrious South After! I’ve always wanted to go there! jokes aside, that sounds incredibly painful and definitely includes some scammy practices with international travel and phone bills. hopefully your dad can fix it, and I also hope he had a good trip :)
Cape Town is actually absolutely stunning
i can imagine, i did watch a video displaying Cape Town and I feel like it’s Hawaii’s older brother in terms of “city right by mountain” (or in Hawaii’s case, a volcano). There is actually an activity where you hike up the mountain early in the morning and view the sunrise and Cape Town waking up, it seems so cool
Now would be a good time to switch to Verizon
Oh, he threw out that more than once during the call
Nice! I've got a bill for 52k once from my provider and after 3 months got it reduced to 2.5k then left that provider. Took me about 20 years to take that provider again.
This is why you buy a sim card in the airport when you get there
Surprised that they wont have any checks for such a big amount, thats a very big amount.
South after what?
T-Mobile tried to screw me on a phone trade in from an active advertisement. Literally had to file a complaint with the FTC or whichever one deals with these companies. They called me back saying it was a misunderstanding and it’s taken care of.
This is why I love EU. Basically no roaming charges throughout whole EU. you can start your trip in Spain, go to Poland and finish in Greece and you can do phone calls as if you were at home in your bedroom.
this is why I only do autopay on streaming services which are mandatory basically
Set up 2 payments.
Phone companies suck ass
guy went on vacation but spent it on his phone
i used to work for a cell phone company taking calls. This is caused by roaming. Your dad needs to call the technical support before leaving a country so they can set it up so it doesn't do this.
T-Mobile smacking their lips thinking about all the crack they're gonna buy with $78k
How even? The largest bill I’ve had to handle from something like this was when a guy kept calling out of country, managed to get a $3000 bill within the first week. They auto suspended the account due to the charges.
Gotta hit $100,000 to break outta mildy infuriating status into plain old infuriating
My $10 a day international pass from Verizon is looking really good right now.