£6400 mobile bill for 6 day honeymoon

saajan_12

zagfles said:

Veteransaver said:

This is always the trouble with contracts Vs PAYG. On payg you'd simply run out of credit.
Charges are part of the contract, but I'm surprised your network provider didn't put a cap on it, it's quite irresponsible to let someone run up a £6k bill (I though it was usual  for networks to notify you at eg £200 that you are running up a big bill.
They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

Yeah yeah, should have checked the cost. Wonder how many of the sanctimonious "all your fault - why didn't you check the price" brigade have ever walked into a pub and ordered a drink without checking the bar tariff first. I'm sure if they'd been charged £10,000 for a pint they'd have paid up and said "silly me, my fault, should have checked the price". Because that really is a similar scale of ripoff. 

There used to be a default £45 worldwide cap on roaming costs that users would have take positive action to exceed. 

Not the same, as with a pub, you can reason that as a pub, selling pints is their headline trade and they wouldn't be in business without fairly competitive prices. I wouldn't go into a restaurant and order without seeing prices, as I know prices can vary wildly, could come out £10 a head or £500 a head. Internet things would obviously vary more. 

zagfles

saajan_12 said:

zagfles said:

Veteransaver said:

This is always the trouble with contracts Vs PAYG. On payg you'd simply run out of credit.
Charges are part of the contract, but I'm surprised your network provider didn't put a cap on it, it's quite irresponsible to let someone run up a £6k bill (I though it was usual  for networks to notify you at eg £200 that you are running up a big bill.
They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

Yeah yeah, should have checked the cost. Wonder how many of the sanctimonious "all your fault - why didn't you check the price" brigade have ever walked into a pub and ordered a drink without checking the bar tariff first. I'm sure if they'd been charged £10,000 for a pint they'd have paid up and said "silly me, my fault, should have checked the price". Because that really is a similar scale of ripoff. 

There used to be a default £45 worldwide cap on roaming costs that users would have take positive action to exceed. 

Not the same, as with a pub, you can reason that as a pub, selling pints is their headline trade and they wouldn't be in business without fairly competitive prices. I wouldn't go into a restaurant and order without seeing prices, as I know prices can vary wildly, could come out £10 a head or £500 a head. Internet things would obviously vary more. 

Why not? Set up a pub in a tourist area or transport hub, somewhere that gets a lot of passing trade from people unfamiliar with the area. Obviously people in the know would avoid, but they wouldn't need many customers at those prices would they. 

Obviously everyone here always checks the price of everything before they buy, including in pubs. You'd be "irresponsible" not to. And to understand what the prices mean, after all if mobile networks can set prices in MB when data is usually purchased in GB, pubs could publish prices per ml instead of per pint. £5 per ml is over £2800 per pint. 

But probably won't work as even pubs are better regulated than mobile networks. 

OP - please come back and let us know the outcome. Really hope you've ignored all those who've implied you just need to pay up and put it down to experience. Dispute it, publicise it. Bet they offer a settlement at a small fraction of the original bill. And hope you have a good Christmas despite all this. 

housebuyer143

zagfles said:

saajan_12 said:

zagfles said:

Veteransaver said:

This is always the trouble with contracts Vs PAYG. On payg you'd simply run out of credit.
Charges are part of the contract, but I'm surprised your network provider didn't put a cap on it, it's quite irresponsible to let someone run up a £6k bill (I though it was usual  for networks to notify you at eg £200 that you are running up a big bill.
They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

Yeah yeah, should have checked the cost. Wonder how many of the sanctimonious "all your fault - why didn't you check the price" brigade have ever walked into a pub and ordered a drink without checking the bar tariff first. I'm sure if they'd been charged £10,000 for a pint they'd have paid up and said "silly me, my fault, should have checked the price". Because that really is a similar scale of ripoff. 

There used to be a default £45 worldwide cap on roaming costs that users would have take positive action to exceed. 

Not the same, as with a pub, you can reason that as a pub, selling pints is their headline trade and they wouldn't be in business without fairly competitive prices. I wouldn't go into a restaurant and order without seeing prices, as I know prices can vary wildly, could come out £10 a head or £500 a head. Internet things would obviously vary more. 

Why not? Set up a pub in a tourist area or transport hub, somewhere that gets a lot of passing trade from people unfamiliar with the area. Obviously people in the know would avoid, but they wouldn't need many customers at those prices would they. 

Obviously everyone here always checks the price of everything before they buy, including in pubs. You'd be "irresponsible" not to. And to understand what the prices mean, after all if mobile networks can set prices in MB when data is usually purchased in GB, pubs could publish prices per ml instead of per pint. £5 per ml is over £2800 per pint. 

But probably won't work as even pubs are better regulated than mobile networks. 

OP - please come back and let us know the outcome. Really hope you've ignored all those who've implied you just need to pay up and put it down to experience. Dispute it, publicise it. Bet they offer a settlement at a small fraction of the original bill. And hope you have a good Christmas despite all this. 

I guess the difference is, you don't have a contract with the pub, they don't hold your bank details and they can't destroy your credit rating. 
EE have a lot more power and you used the service at the advertised price, because they did send a text informing the OP.

That being said I wouldn't pay this without a fight because it's a huge amount of money 

zagfles

housebuyer143 said:

zagfles said:

saajan_12 said:

zagfles said:

Veteransaver said:

This is always the trouble with contracts Vs PAYG. On payg you'd simply run out of credit.
Charges are part of the contract, but I'm surprised your network provider didn't put a cap on it, it's quite irresponsible to let someone run up a £6k bill (I though it was usual  for networks to notify you at eg £200 that you are running up a big bill.
They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

Yeah yeah, should have checked the cost. Wonder how many of the sanctimonious "all your fault - why didn't you check the price" brigade have ever walked into a pub and ordered a drink without checking the bar tariff first. I'm sure if they'd been charged £10,000 for a pint they'd have paid up and said "silly me, my fault, should have checked the price". Because that really is a similar scale of ripoff. 

There used to be a default £45 worldwide cap on roaming costs that users would have take positive action to exceed. 

Not the same, as with a pub, you can reason that as a pub, selling pints is their headline trade and they wouldn't be in business without fairly competitive prices. I wouldn't go into a restaurant and order without seeing prices, as I know prices can vary wildly, could come out £10 a head or £500 a head. Internet things would obviously vary more. 

Why not? Set up a pub in a tourist area or transport hub, somewhere that gets a lot of passing trade from people unfamiliar with the area. Obviously people in the know would avoid, but they wouldn't need many customers at those prices would they. 

Obviously everyone here always checks the price of everything before they buy, including in pubs. You'd be "irresponsible" not to. And to understand what the prices mean, after all if mobile networks can set prices in MB when data is usually purchased in GB, pubs could publish prices per ml instead of per pint. £5 per ml is over £2800 per pint. 

But probably won't work as even pubs are better regulated than mobile networks. 

OP - please come back and let us know the outcome. Really hope you've ignored all those who've implied you just need to pay up and put it down to experience. Dispute it, publicise it. Bet they offer a settlement at a small fraction of the original bill. And hope you have a good Christmas despite all this. 

I guess the difference is, you don't have a contract with the pub, they don't hold your bank details and they can't destroy your credit rating. 
EE have a lot more power and you used the service at the advertised price, because they did send a text informing the OP.

That being said I wouldn't pay this without a fight because it's a huge amount of money 

AIUI you form a contract when you order a pint. Just like these carparks where they claim you form a contract just by parking there, without even talking to anyone. 

Contracts can of course be unfair. For various reasons. Like you say OP should challenge. Past cases have resulted in settlements far below the original bill. 

Kim_13

Tucosalamanca said:

How much do you expect EE to reasonably do?

It took me 30 seconds to find roaming costs for Morocco and I'm not even an EE customer.

Get unlimited minutes, texts and 500MB of data for 24-hours while you’re away. You can only buy roaming passes when you get to the country. We will send you a text when you land.

This service appears to be £7.50 per day, if only you'd taken a minute to check before leaving...

Roaming Costs | Help | EE

The fact that you can only buy passes when you get to the country means that if you do wish to do this, you will be paying the exorbitant rates to do so. The alternative would be public WiFi, which is hardly sensible when a fraudster could use that to access your mobile account and add devices to your plan.

No doubt the text on landing with some operators directs the user to a page on their website which isn’t free to view either. Data cost per MB, and cost per SMS and per minute should be in the text along with any receiving charges, and the part of the site selling passes zero rated.

The whole thing could be better managed, including allowing customers to queue passes to start on the day of travel. Who could possibly think that a customer wouldn’t take issue with being charged £6,400 for data, and would have given their informed consent to such? It doesn’t just mean being told, it means you have to understand, e.g. streaming a typical sports match of this duration will in HD will cost X, downloading an email Y, a typical 5 minute YouTube video Z. 

Perhaps a default spending cap of £100 would be the responsible thing to do - you can’t spend any more on a card without entering your PIN after all, and if online you are probably being asked for authorisation at much lower values. I do wonder how much of such bills end up as bad debt, because in my view it’s set up as a trap you have to avoid falling into.

Frozen_up_north

Odd that the original poster hasn’t come back to the thread and they have only posted once on these forums 

flaneurs_lobster

Frozen_up_north said:

Odd that the original poster hasn’t come back to the thread and they have only posted once on these forums 

Not that surprising when the OP asks for help with a 6.5 grand roaming bill and the consensus of the replies is "tough, lap it up, serves you right". 

zagfles

Kim_13 said:

Tucosalamanca said:

How much do you expect EE to reasonably do?

It took me 30 seconds to find roaming costs for Morocco and I'm not even an EE customer.

Get unlimited minutes, texts and 500MB of data for 24-hours while you’re away. You can only buy roaming passes when you get to the country. We will send you a text when you land.

This service appears to be £7.50 per day, if only you'd taken a minute to check before leaving...

Roaming Costs | Help | EE

The fact that you can only buy passes when you get to the country means that if you do wish to do this, you will be paying the exorbitant rates to do so. The alternative would be public WiFi, which is hardly sensible when a fraudster could use that to access your mobile account and add devices to your plan.

No doubt the text on landing with some operators directs the user to a page on their website which isn’t free to view either. Data cost per MB, and cost per SMS and per minute should be in the text along with any receiving charges, and the part of the site selling passes zero rated.

The whole thing could be better managed, including allowing customers to queue passes to start on the day of travel. Who could possibly think that a customer wouldn’t take issue with being charged £6,400 for data, and would have given their informed consent to such? It doesn’t just mean being told, it means you have to understand, e.g. streaming a typical sports match of this duration will in HD will cost X, downloading an email Y, a typical 5 minute YouTube video Z. 

Perhaps a default spending cap of £100 would be the responsible thing to do - you can’t spend any more on a card without entering your PIN after all, and if online you are probably being asked for authorisation at much lower values. I do wonder how much of such bills end up as bad debt, because in my view it’s set up as a trap you have to avoid falling into.

There used to be a spending cap when the legacy of EU rules still applied. Now the only consumer "protection" is from the totally useless ofcom.  Compared with banking regulation it's just one extreme to the other, banks had to refund PPI just because they were making a 50%+ profit margin (Plevin ruling), yet mobile providers can apparently make astronomical margins on stuff like roaming with predatory pricing designed to exploit the unknowledgable/careless, and the regulator doesn't seem to care. 

Kim_13

mr_stripey said:

DE_612183 said:

why the hell would you need your phone and use that much data on your honeymoon?

As DGG says, not much you can do apart from appeal to the good nature of someone in EE, and there any extenuating circumstances - illness at home etc?

It might not be as much data as you think. The Scottish MP incurred an £11k bill in Morocco for a mere 6GB of data on his ipad

https://news.stv.tv/politics/scottish-health-secretary-blames-11000-ipad-roaming-charge-on-sons-watching-football-games

That might suggest data use of 3GB or so - hardly excessive. That could’ve been one match of the sport of their choice and who knows, perhaps the couple share a love of whatever was viewed and watched it together.

I do think there should be a default cap on data, separate to calls and texts - not having access to data isn’t going to be life or death. It will be the ‘you’d be glad there wasn’t a cap of zero by default if someone had been taken ill’ that the operators will be clinging to to not do more than Ofcom currently require of them. I wonder what percentage of the bill they need paid to cover the costs passed to them by the overseas network?