Japanese Olympic Champion Racks Up $5,000 Bill Playing Pokemon Go in Brazil (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A Japanese Olympics star has blamed Pokemon Go after being hit with a 500,000 yen (about $5,000) bill in roaming charges from his carrier. Artistic gymnast Kohei Uchimura, who won gold at the 2012 Games in London and is the reigning world champion, said he only downloaded the game after arriving in Sao Paulo to train for Rio, but quickly got hooked despite not having arranged a flat rate for data roaming. Uchimura "couldn't believe his eyes" when he saw the bill, according to the Kyodo news agency, with teammate Kenzo Shirai saying "He looked dead at the team meal that day." Even though Pokemon Go isn't particularly heavy on data and there were likely other culprits -- the game only officially came out in Brazil today, though Uchimura may have been playing the Japanese version -- roaming charges can rack up extremely quickly when you use your phone abroad for pretty much anything online.

Comments

Re:Roaming charges is a racket of tolls and taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

But this guy competes internationally, has he got an excuse for not knowing the costs of international data roaming? With the two telcos I've used, when I land in a new country, I get a text telling me the call, text and data charges there; if that isn't ubiquitous, it really should be. When I see that "Data costs £5 per MB" in some non-EU countries, that's a great incentive to check that I switched data roaming off.

Re: Roaming charges is a racket of tolls and taxes

[naughtynaughty]

Or T-Mobile, I travel outside the US > 50% of my time and appreciate my phone always working and always having data with the data free, though not high speed.

Beware International Travel

[Jason Levine]

A lot of people might travel internationally and just assume that their phone will serve them data at the same cost as in their home country. When we were going to go on a cruise to the Bahamas, we inquired about how much data would cost. Once we knew how much ($2 per MB), we made sure to put our phones in airplane mode for the duration of the trip, using them only to take photos that could be shared later via the ship's WiFi (which we had a set number of minutes access to) or when we returned to the US.