A WOMAN holidaying in Bodrum was landed with a £12,500 mobile bill after she accidentally used her phone to download repeats of sitcom ‘My Family’, the Daily Mail reports.
Patricia Al, 23, from Chelsea, London, was hit with the huge bill after downloading just two episodes of the BBC comedy via her O2 phone.
Miss Al was on holiday and using the hotel Wifi to download the series from iTunes onto her laptop. But the Wi-Fi connection cut out and her phone – which was hooked up to her computer while it was charging – took over the download.
The glitch meant the intern property consultant was charged an incredible £5,156, 97 for one episode and £5,453.80 for another – a total of £10, 611.
Ms Al was also charged over £2,500 for other data bundles she used on holiday, and returned home to a total bill from O2 of £12,520.87. The figure could buy 323 complete box sets of the all 11 series of the hit show.
Luckily for Miss Al her father has offered to foot the bill.
She said: “I had no idea what had happened until I got a message from O2 on my last day of my holiday, saying my phone may have been stolen, because my bill was so large.
‘I had a look online at my bill, and I couldn’t believe my eyes – it was more than £12,000. It’s quite scary really, I didn’t press anything – I had no idea something like this could happen, and I want to warn others.
‘It’s really quite embarrassing – I had to ask my father to bail me out.’
She added: ‘Nobody in their right mind would deliberately use such large amounts of data on their mobile – I can’t believe that O2 actually sent me the bill. I take responsibility for that – taking off my data cap. But the size of the final bill is just ridiculous.”
The phone giant has since reduced her bill by £6,644.97 – for the data she used after August 24 until the end of her holiday.
An O2 spokesperson said: ‘We are clear with customers on the charges they can expect from overseas mobile phone usage. Our O2 Travel service caps this usage and we advise customers to think carefully before they ask us to remove it.”