Imagine being subscribed to an AT&T plan where your monthly bill is only a couple of hundred dollars. Then one fine day, you check your bill and suddenly you’re on the hook for $6,000. That’s pretty much what happened with Redditor u/Usual-Guava-8899 when they discovered that their latest AT&T bill was worth $6223.60.
Mistake on AT&T’s part
It might be easy to chalk this up to the fault of the customer. Maybe they used more data than they were allocated. Maybe they made more calls than they thought. Thankfully, in this instance, the mistake was actually on AT&T’s part.
According to the user, their AT&T phone bill is roughly in the $250 – $266 range every month. They were on an unlimited data plan so they knew right away that this wasn’t right. In fact, as a first responder, they were told that their bill would actually go down by a few dollars every month. Clearly this wasn’t the case.
When they reached out to AT&T on the phone, they were given the runaround. They were told that their bill was actually $205. This was despite the fact that they were logged into their account and was looking at the bill of $6223.60 with their own two eyes. Eventually they gave up and went to a corporate store in Dallas where the bill was located.
It turns out that there was a mistake on AT&T’s end where they were accidentally put on a pay-per-use plan. This was a super expensive plan where they were charged $2 per MB used. The total amount of data they used that month was 3,097MB, which resulted in a massive bill.
According to the poster, they were told by the store associate that they would reach out to corporate and that hopefully they’d have an answer by the end of the day. The incident took place on December 12th, but until now, the customer has yet to hear back from the carrier.
Shocking bills
The concept of bill shock isn’t new. More often than not, we come across stories of customers who come back from holidays with massive carrier bills. This can sometimes be attributed to the fault of customers who might have forgotten to turn off data roaming.
When data roaming is enabled, carriers tend to bill you per MB you use while overseas. This is versus when you’re back home and you might have a plan that offers you unlimited data. Some customers might mistakenly assume that their plans apply to overseas travel, but that is rarely the case.
In some instances, carriers might offer you a data roaming plan, but those usually need to be opted in. We’ve also heard how some parents have gotten credit card bill shocks of their lives when their kids make a ton of in-app purchases without their permission or knowledge. We’ve seen how this can result in bills totaling several thousand dollars!
In any case, it’s always a good idea to check your bills to make sure it’s correct. Also, if you plan to travel, consider buying a local SIM or turn off data roaming just to be safe!
