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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?
You have to dig pretty deep for this to actually be specified, but he was docked at Miami, before the ship ever left port.
The cock-up was that the ship had already turned on their satellite-based cell network, even though they shouldn't have, which resulted in the guy's phone connecting to the Ship's netwrok & being billed at international rates.
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When I used to live 5 miles from the Canadian boarder I would hear nightmare stories like this all the time. People, despite being in the US would find that their cell was roaming to a Canadian tower because it had a better signal. It was bad then, even before data. Now I can only imagine how horrible it must be.
I wonder if there is any danger of this happening to anyone using a mobile near the coast?
Yes.
Thank you for consulting The Slashdot Oracle.
As I suspected, TFA says he was connected to the ship's cell network, which should not have been operational while it was docked.
So it's not just me having horrible experiences with AT&T, then. I tried to get DSL service from them last year. After four technician visits, I had service for two full days before it stopped working. I canceled service and returned the equipment in their postage-paid box, and they sent me a $70 bill. I called to complain, and told them I was willing to pay for the two days I had service, and nothing more. They told me they'd look into it, but they had no way of sending me a corrected bill. I did not pay them a penny, and I have not heard from them again.
We also had phone service with them for a bit. When I set it up, I specifically asked for unlimited calling to Canada, and was assured it was on the plan. I called back again for another reason, and was again assured that I had unlimited calling to Canada. Next month's bill? $1200. They had not added unlimited calling to Canada. It took me about a half-dozen calls to sort it out, during which time I was told that it was impossible for me to talk to anyone who was capable of modifying my bill, because "they don't have phone numbers."
I recently had to deal with AT&T Wireless, and was asked to verify my identity. I provided my information, and they told me it was incorrect. I told them they were incorrect. After about two hours of phone calls, it turns out they were using a default value for the information they asked for. When I provided the actual value, they looked at the default, and said that I was wrong. Apparently they could not figure out that "9999" was probably not the actual last 4 digits of anyone's SSN.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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).
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
There's no way for your home provider to have a real time accounting of the calls that you make while roaming.
That's a bit of an overstatement. There are several ways of speeding up the information and if you use CAMEL it's possible for the home network to specify some limits in advance which gives full real time billing control. It would take a certain amount of effort, but it's not nearly impossible nowadays. How do you think prepaid subscribers get service when they go abroad? Do you think the phone company lets you rack up 28k Euro charges on your 30Euro prepaid SIM before doing reconciliation?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I wouldn't call it a poor design.
I certainly would. A cellphone should never choose a roaming cell over a local one.
The design is to connect to the tower with the best reception.
In the UK, early on in the development of digital cellphones, some users complained that their phones would pick up transmitters from France if they were near the coast (presumably the Calais transmitter was closer than the nearest one from their network).
As far as I know, this doesn't happen now. A phone won't chose a transmitter from abroad over a local one.
Which is ridiculous. The roaming provider can stream slingbox to a user but they can't keep usage data up to date in near real-time? No such cap exists because it's more profitable to fuck over people than to implement it.
"The design is to connect to the tower with the best reception"
But as this story points out, there are factors other than "best reception" than can weigh into which tower is best to connect to. Looking at only one factor in a multi-dimensional problem is a poor design.
In a good design, the phone would connect to a "home network" tower with "acceptable" reception before even looking at an "international roaming / if you have to ask you can't afford it" tower.
Actually, according to the article, AT&T was sending him repeated SMS warnings but he did not get them because it was a data card, not a phone. That means to me that they did know what was going on and a cap could be implemented.
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA
I had the same battle with my provider (Rogers in Canada). Because I'm "tethering" (connecting a Nokia N770 tablet with BlueTooth to my KRZR phone) the "best" data package I can get is $10 for 10 MB, nothing bigger. However if I go over those 10MB, they charge me 3 cts per kB. Which means that the second 10MB will cost me $300.
BTW, my first night of surfing a little to maps.google (just 20 mins, nothing more) did indeed cost me $75.
But the kicker is that I can't get a bigger package, Rogers is not able or willing to put a 10MB cap on it and finally -- this is the worst part -- I can't get an status report to check how much of my quota I've used up.
This is not just rediculous, but simply "providers screwing there customers, because they can".
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...