Slashdot Mirror
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.
Despite this is the digital age of free information, ISP/Phone carriers still rape and pillage wholesale where they can. I'm not a fan of big government but this is one area they need SEVERE regulation. Those fuckers are the oil barons and railroad tycoons of this century.
"The story has a happy ending, though — after Uchimura called his carrier to explain, he was let off with a flat daily charge of around $30, which is enough to make him probably wish he'd just bought a Brazilian SIM card but you know, not $5,000."
It's comical. This could have happened with Youtube, Candy Crush, etc. Is it noteworthy because a) it's the Olympics, b) it's Pokemon Go, c) it's a slow news day or d) all of the above?
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The whole mobile roaming is such a scam. I mean, with pretty much everything that you pay money for, you can always get a clearly define price *before* deciding on a purchase. And a lot of times (stores with a check-out) you can even say "it's too expensive, I don't want that". With roaming charges (both data and voice), you have to jump through hoops (i.e. call someone and wait on hold for XX minutes) to get the price, and often enough they cannot tell you because you don't always know your exact location beforehand. Why can you get that info from your phone? Right there and then, before making a call, or before incurring data charges. I'm sure it's technically possible, and if the info isn't yet sent to the phone every time to change roaming provider, I'm sure we can force it to happen via legislation. For once Congress can do some good.
Also, it's easy to call someone a moron, but when you are under a lot of pressure because you are going to compete in the Olympics, I can totally see forgetting that I'm in a different country when checking my phone and deciding to catch some 'mons and losing track of time.