$30,000 Data Bill: The iPhone Owner’s Worst Nightmare

Next time you get all in a rage over your carrier charging you for a data overage, consider the case of Chris Bovis, an iPhone owner from the UK who was the recipient of about $30,000 in charges on the Orange network.

Every once in awhile you hear about this kind of thing, but I’m not sure any tale of a data overage has ever been as extreme as the one of Mr. Bovis. The case is short on details, but as it goes, Bovis apparently got tipped off when Orange shut down his service due to an automatic payment not going through. He then discovered that they were trying to bill him for $14,000 of data, which was understandably throwing his bank account into a tizzy… It doesn’t end there, though, since the friendly Orange representative also told Bovis that the next bill coming down the pipe would be fore $16,000.

It would be awesome to have a recording of how that phone call went down. At first, Bovis could only get Orange to reduce the bill to $450, which is still entirely too much to pay for what we can only assume were average usage patterns. According to Bovis, an unidentified issue with the iPhone was causing it to download data even when it was switched off. The story goes that Apple employees confirmed some kind of problem, and good old Orange eventually decided not to take hundreds of dollars from Bovis afterall.

There’s really no moral to this story, since it doesn’t sound like anything Bovis did caused his phone to go into this unimaginable data consumption frenzy… But maybe the data bugs in iOS 6 haven’t been completely eradicated just yet?!

About the Author

Devin Wieland

 

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