How To Rack Up $28,000 In Roaming Without Leaving the US

pmbasehore writes "While waiting for his cruise ship to depart, a man decided to use his AT&T wireless card and Slingbox account to watch the Bears vs. Lions football game. When he got his bill, he was slammed with $28,067.31 in 'International Roaming' charges, even though he never left American soil. The bill was finally dropped to $290.65, but only after the media got involved." He might have left the soil (the story says he was already aboard the ship), but shouldn't the dock count?

Comments

Re:Did His Contract Specify "Internal Waters"?

[purpledinoz]

This is completely ridiculous. Customers should be able to set a bill cap to prevent this kind of thing. If you hit the cap, your access gets cut unless you explicitly give permission to charge more. That's why I use a prepaid phone (I live in Germany, so it's dirt cheap here).

Re:I recently was on a cruise

[Shakrai]

As much as I hate AT&T, this just isn't their fault this time.

Actually it is their fault. AT&T disables the ability of their phones to display a proper roaming banner. Regardless of which network you are on your phone will always say "AT&T". On the other hand, T-Mobile will show the name of the actual network you are connected to, i.e: "T-Mobile", "AT&T", "Cellular One", etc, etc. Given that AT&T removes your ability to know when your phone is roaming I would say that it's very much their fault when people rack up roaming charges by accident.