AT&T Slaps Family With a $19,370 Cell Phone Bill

theodp writes "Mama, don't let your babies send e-mail and photos from Vancouver. A Portland family racked up nearly $20,000 in charges on their AT&T bill after their son headed north to Vancouver and used a laptop with an AirCard twenty-one times to send photos and e-mails back home. The family said they wished they would have received some kind of warning before receiving their chock-full-of-international-fees 200-page bill in the mail for $19,370. Guess they didn't read the fine print in that 'Stay connected whether you are traveling across town, the US, or the world' AT&T AirCard pitch. Hey, at least it wasn't $85,000."

Comments

Re:Perhaps some confusion about the brand Aircard

[shitzu]

BSD is Linux? I never knew, thanks!

I never said that. I said you could call OSX a BSD rather than Linux. But i wouldn't even do that.

Re:Oh Noes!

[bigstrat2003]

While what you say is true, I think one thing here needs to be looked into more closely: the advertising. It would probably be very hard to lock down a definition for what is reasonable to advertise, but I think we can safely say that it is unreasonable to advertise that you provide service internationally without very clearly saying that it costs more than any average person could afford. The advertisement is deliberately misleading, and that isn't acceptable.

Again, though, actually trying to make up a law for this sort of situation would be hard, and I'm not sure how it could be done.