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If he owes T-Mobile $100, that's his problem.
If he owes T-Mobile $143,000, that's T-Mobile's problem.
How could T-Mobile really expect anyone to pay that big of a bill?
I have T-Mobile and when I've traveled internationally or into roaming only areas, it always warns me via SMS and gives me an option to turn data roaming off... So I can only imagine this guy got that warning and ignored it...
Still 143k is a bit excessive, and it looks like after reviewing it, and also at some point after it started making news headlines, T-Mobile agreed and credited his account to make it even. Doesn't look like the article knows if that was just a result of just how much time it takes to go through the review process at T-Mobile, or if it took the news agencies inquiry to get the attention of someone high up enough at T-Mobile to make the decision.
I'm willing to bet there are ultra wealthy people who do the same kind of thing and just don't question the bills and pay them, so phone companies are incentivized to not cap the monthly bill to some percentage of what the highest plan that could have covered it would have been... Maybe T-Mobile would be better served by having a system in place where a low tier operator can reduce the bill to something like 50% over whatever they would charge someone for a global international everything unlimited type plan. So something like "ok, we see you racked up $143,000 in fees from international data roaming, if you had been on X plan, it would have only cost you $250, so I can lower your bill from $143,000 to $325." That way they can still get the money from the ultra rich who don't care while also having something in place to allow the average customer to also deal with these kinds of mistakes without bankrupting them.
A relative of mine worked on the anti-fraud team at a major UK bank. He'd been there a while and was pretty handy at his job, so he got allocated to the private banking arm - where high net worth customers got their gucci cards with ridiculous perks, so long as they credited their account with (or invested) £100k per year or whatever.
Most people were generally appreciative when the algorithm pinged the odd transaction that was out of the ordinary, and were thankful when he called them to check that the transactions were genuine or not.
Two groups of people stood out to him:
-Footballers: nice enough folk, but almost inevitably opened with "hold on, I'll put my mum on" when dealing with finances;
-People with more money than sense: a specific anecdone jumped out, namely one where their card had been used to buy two first class return tickets from South Africa to London with British Airways, totalling something daft like close to £10k. He calls the customer up, explains the reason, and the customer's all "...why are you bothering me about a sum of money like that?"
I absolutely do believe that people either have so much money that huge bill spikes just get lost in the noise - that, or just use a company device for a large business or government dept and hope the overall bill jump isn't big enough to notice.
Absolutely wild.
Gotta respect the footballers for that. They recognize they may not be smart enough to figure it out and put someone on that they can trust. Who can anyone trust if not their mama. I feel bad for people who have terrible parents. I haven't always seen eye to eye with my mom and our relationship is still a smidge strained but I know she cares for me and would break the earth for me. As she always says, it's not her house it's our house.
A lot of these guys have been in the circuit since they were kids so the parents have been behind the career the whole time.
I was once told, by someone that worked in the industry, that some wealthy celebrities employ someone specifically to dispute every purchase they make, because often the dispute isn't contested.
I used to work for a Canadian carrier. They had "white glove" customers where no matter what they asked for, we did it. They dispute $1000 charge? Credit it. They say they dropped their phone in the toilet and would like a new one but don't want to pay for it? Send it and credit it.
Those calls were also reviewed next business day to ensure compliance.
The head of the company I worked for did a my Everest trip with some coworkers. They took their phones and laptops so they could keep working, and I set them up with a mobile satellite hotspot.
In the first week they had racked up $15k in charges. The sat provider was calling me every $5k to approve the costs, which we did. They eventually needed a c-level to sign a doc saying we would pay.
After another week or two and it was around a $25k bill which was paid without fanfare.
Yes rich people pay these bills because they make a shit ton of money.
$15 per megabyte...
Meanwhile, I went to Spain from Sweden, and kept using my data like home, though I did get a data cap of 50GB per month there, we used my phone with carplay all week as we drove around the beautiful mountains in Andalucia.
Roam like home pwnz!
Thanks EU!
Hell he should own the tower at that rate