Did you know: the highest cellular service bill ever unpaid in the U.S. was $201k

Ever had a surprise bill blow up in your inbox at the end of a vacation? There, there, no need to cringe! No matter how bad you had it, you surely didn't have it as bad as Celina Aarons! Celina is a woman from South Florida that must have experienced the king and queen of bill shocks when she got a $201,000 invoice. It only got worse when it turned out that T-Mobile was completely serious about expecting her to pay up.

How did it get to this? See, Celina has two brothers who are born deaf and have no means of verbal communication. The younger one, Shamir, was in college and didn't have a job at the time. Celina is close to him and uses texting to communicate. With her monthly data plan, the bill came at about $175 on average, which is reasonable given the challenging situation. But when Shamir went for a two-week holiday in Canada, it didn't occur to anyone to get him an international plan. Uh-oh! As Celina and her brother went on to send video files and over 2000 texts between each other over the course of 14 days, occasionally racking up $2000 in data charges for downloading a single vid. Shamir was billed approximately $10 per megabyte.

Needless to say, Celina was extremely upset by the development, adding that the bill is "like paying for a nice house right now." She also argued that T-Mo didn't communicate the astronomically rising charges in time to either of the parties, although the carrier claimed Shamir was sent at least five texts as the dollars piled up. Still, the considerate Magenta-painted telecom agreed to shave off some $198,500 off the bill and gave Celina six months to pay the new $2500 liability. The story happened way back in 2011 and it must have provoked changes in the telecom industry, for no such outrageous cases have occured since then.

via DailyMail

Also read:


Latest Stories

FCC OKs Cingular's purchase of AT&T Wireless