Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

Here’s a tale with a simple warning – don’t be silly enough to download British TV shows to your laptop whilst using a mobile phone data card abroad. 

That’s just what one Vodaphone customer did, whilst he and his son were staying abroad (in Meribel to be precise), and he came home to a bill for a whopping £21,716.

I’m amazed that Vodafone could allow an individual to run up such a huge bill without any warning or agreement of a credit limit. It’s utterly staggering. There’s no warning when you log on how much it will cost a minute or a counter on the screen telling you what it is costing. If you ran up such a bill on your credit card while overseas you’d get a call checking that it is you who is spending so much.

Thankfully, Vodaphone have done the right thing and written the bill off, due to exceptional circumstances.

So just what TV programmes were they so desperate not to miss that they were prepared to run up such a bill? The simply “unmissable” Top Gear and Kavanagh QC, of course. It’s almost as bad as the case of the bloke who ran up an £11,000 bill downloading Friends in Germany. Loser.

Via TechRadar

photo credit: Kofoed (yep, I’m aware it’s not a Vodaphone data card in the pic)