6 craziest phone bill charges
1. Football fan charges $27,000 for streaming the Beats battle the Detroit Loins
A Chicago Bear’s fan to the core, Wayne Burdick of Schaumburg, Ill., had to cheer on his team — even while on a Caribbean cruise.
So using his laptop, a wireless card and Slingbox device that let him watch the game via an Internet connection, he tuned into watch the Bears battle the Detroit Lions.
2. A teenager racked up a $4,800 bill in text messaging
Gregg Christoffersen called it a “heart attack in an envelope.”
When he saw the bill his 13-year-old daughter Dena had racked up by text messaging her friends, the Cheyenne, Wyoming, man was stunned.
In just one month, she sent and received enough text messages to justify (at least to the cell phone company) a nearly $4,800 bill.
3. A man in Canada was charged $83,7000 for using the internet instead of his home computer
In 2007, a 22-year-old Canadian oil-field worker faced an astronomical $83,700 (C$85,000) cell phone bill, according to Reuters.
Piotr Staniaszek, who lived in rural Alberta, made headlines when his father brought his story to the media.
4. Class action law suit over a $5,000 due to data usage
In March, an Oklahoma woman filed a lawsuit against AT&T and RadioShack after a new netbook landed her with a $5,000 bill for exceeding her monthly data cap.
For $99.99, Billie Parks purchased the lighter and cheaper laptop cousin from RadioShack in December, according to the popular technology blog Ars Technica. With her new Acer Aspire One she signed a two-year contract for AT&T’s mobile broadband service. For about $60 a month, the company offers 3G Internet access on the go.
In her complaint, Parks said that though she was warned by RadioShack that her first monthly bill might be a bit higher than expected, she was unaware that Internet data usage over 5GB would result in “astronomical additional charges running into the thousands of dollars,” Ars Technica said.
5. The world record: a 218 Trillion dollar phone bill
Whenever you start to sweat the sight of your phone bill, think of this.
In April 2006, a Malaysian man received a $218 trillion phone bill and was ordered to fork over the money within 10 days or face prosecution, The Associated Press reported.
After his father died earlier that year, Yahaya Wahad said he disconnected his late father’s phone line. But Telekom Malaysia, the country’s largest telecommunications provider, later sent him a 806,400,000,000,000.01-ringgit (U.S. $218 trillion) bill.
The company said the bill was for recent phone calls and said if he didn’t pay up within 10 days he’d face legal proceedings.
