I dunno, Wall-E was a pretty good movie.

Only $17,000, that's nice. Why not just drop it altogether (the overages) as a one-time grace thing? It'd be good PR for the company now that the news has broken, and how much did the download really cost them?

i read this article a while back, and at that point, my reaction was "how the hell can you be so stupid to rack up that much data usage"
my attitude has turned more towards the providers now, a bill that large can only cause ill-will against them (and you know that if he had an "unlimited package, they would have cut him off around the $500 mark)

Well you can't really have an unlimited world data plan. The cost to transfer between nation's ISPs is outrageous. I can believe that it cost them to $17,000 to transfer, lets say, 4 GB of movie. I feel sorry for the guy, but I feel its his fault for not knowing his billing rate, and should be grateful it was dropped from $62,000 to $17,000, because I'm sure they had no legal obligation to do so

where did he get wall-e from? isn't that a new release?

why is he bringing he nephew to mexico to watch Wall-E?

it is willfully negligent to unconscionably allow an account to be drastically overdrawn.

contact the consumer after a certain point to verify that level of spending is intentional.

the level of rediculousness in play should question thier license to operate.

What we still can't figure out is why so many companies continue to go ahead and bill for activity that's going to lead to outrageous amounts like this, instead of disabling the account and sending an email, text message, or voice mail to the customer warning him about what he's doing.

Sounds like a horrible precedent to set.

I waited a significant amount of time until a Consumerist Post, with the angle of 'victim' was insinuated. It's weird how your writers can constantly write something like this, with how many stories you've done on the 'evils of overages'. I thought you'd get sick of hearing about the whiney victim consumers, but my bad!! While you feel it necessary to be babysat by your provider, I'm sick of you people not reading/knowing stuff about any of your gadgets. You have to be blind, never read, and not able to comprehend language to NOT know that using your cell phone internationally is a bit costly. It's disgusting that you're putting so much blame on the 'big guys'. Sure, they could totally credit this guy - which is FAR MORE than I would do. I'm so sick of this 'babysit me!' society coming from the US. Save the big companies! Save the banks! Save the people! Save YOURSELVES. There IS reason why ANYBODY HERE SHOULD EVER HAVE ANY OVERAGES ON THEIR [insert product here] PLANS! Be it cable, cell, LD, etc. UNLESS YOU ARE USING MORE THAN THE PLAN YOU AGREE UPON ALREADY.

It's not [insert any company here]'s fault that you're too 'important' to check the details of your plans, or that you're 'too busy', or that 'nobody ever reads these things!'

I've never ever ever ever once in my life had overage on my cell phone plan. Yes, I work for the company so I know what's in my plan, but ignorance is a really crappy excuse.

Correction: There IS NO REASON why anybody here should ever have overages... etc. :)

@Sam Smith:

Its hard to believe that a 4GB movie actually cost then anywhere close to $17,000, even in Mexico. Even if he used up all the bandwidth they were allotted, I can't imagine the cost of bandwidth exceeding $3/GB. In a world like we live in today, bandwidth is extremely cheap and companies just like to exaggerate their costs.

I would bill him $500 or less for this "outrageous" *cough* use of bandwidth, because I'm sure thats 5000% of what it cost them(Unless they have a price gouging internet provider that provides to them... which he used).

@supercereal: It's not like there is a running meter there to show the guy how much money the download is costing him. I could easily see how someone could do this without really thinking about it.

Allowing someone to rack up a bill for more than the average person makes in a year without so much as a warning is insane. I agree with the others - if you get to say $100 over, cut them off without an explicit OK or at least a warning.

I wonder what he's going to do now. I know if I got hit with a $17,000 overcharge like that my only option would probably be to declare bankruptcy...

@enderx:

You waited all this time just to blame the victim? Nice. Whether the person in the OP read the contract of not, $62,000 is nowhere near the same stratosphere as a reasonable bill.

I agree with the "he should have known or researched it"crowd. I have the iPhone with AT&T. When in Mexico or Europe I use it for texting and the occasional call, but never for data transfer.

In fact on AT&T's page it actually gives a price example and quotes something like "downloading a 2mb photo will cost you $40 based on the rates."

Of course this makes for a fun water cooler story - and makes everyone think the carrier is a money hungry grubby company - but it's perfectly logical to me.

I'm sure the bill will be settled for much less - but I don't give the idiot any sympathy.

Yeah I wouldn't pay this bill. The man in this story is an idiot. You can easily get a pirated movie in Mexico for like 10 pesos which is like 10 cents.

This is different than a carrier charging, say, $5000 when LIKE OMG!!! GINA TOTALLY SENT 20000 TXTS OMG!
That's pure profit for the carrier as long as it's on their own network.

But the U.S. carriers don't have any infrastructure in Mexico so $17,000 may well be their actual cost from the Mexican company(s). It's interesting though that if their cost is 17K, the profit is 63%.

I think the consumer has to take some responsibility for this one, however. If you get a voice or data plan, you need to look over it to understand what's included and what's not, and this was obviously a case of not doing so. My parents are going to Canada this summer, and I made sure to tell them that Verizon charges 50¢/min roaming up there -- or wait, maybe it's .50¢/min... it's the same if you look at it on paper wise. Anyway, if they go, they know the costs, so there shouldn't be any surprises.

here you go - from AT&T's page. I'm sure these is simple to find for any carrier with a bit of research:

++ While using data on iPhone is unlimited within the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, international data roaming can get expensive quickly as international roaming rates apply. Voice and data usage, including data usage incurred from delivery of Visual Voicemail messages, will be charged at international rates. For a complete list of countries visit att.com/dataconnectglobal and rates visit att.com/worldpackages. AT&T offers these iPhone International traveling tips to help you keep control of data usage.

Please Note:
1 MB = 1024KB
$0.0195/KB = about $20/MB
$0.010/KB = about $10/MB
$0.005/KB = about $5/MB

@chris_d:
Oh, scratch that -- roaming in Canada is 69¢ from verizon.

@chris_d: Well, I'm guessing most US companies have agreements in place to use canadian carrier's infrastructure because of the amount of cross-border access there is.

Honestly, 17k seems outrageously high even if the data had to come through satalite uplink like they do in Cuba.

While the account holder does hold some of the blame for not realizing the costs involved with international data transfer through his carrier, I feel the carrier has some responsibility to reasonably halt what would constitute obscene overage. I mean your credit cards would get locked down if they suddenly saw a huge charge suddenly appearing which is way off your norm spending.

I mean, it's not like they need to limit to to something obscenely low, but say if they put a freeze on the data link when it reaches $500 until the account holder calls and verifies that they are in fact prepared to pay these fees would be a great benefit. Just allowing a bill to rack up to $62,000 really seems to be beyond silly.

actually, i have re-thought my initial comment.
i've decided to go with "at least he didn't receive swine flu"

@Nate128:

You would think, but no.

@Yebo:

Netflix....?

Let's leave aside whether or not the guy was stupid for downloading a movie in Mexico (probably, but you've got to remember that a LOT of people are really not very tech savvy -- I could theoretically see one of my parents doing something similar). The important issue is that being able to run up a $62,000 bill in a day is just bad system design. I have trouble imagining a scenario where anyone (even a big corporation) would have a legitimate need to rack up a bill like that. I totally agree that they should cut you off after downloading a certain amount, since in ever conceivable case the person is doing it accidentally. And it would really be better for everyone in the end, since these kinds of bills lead to bad press for the company, and often won't get paid anyway.

@enderx: Sometime in the future when you screw up big time and use the excuse that you didn't know, maybe someone will throw that same tirade on you?

And I, too, worked in the industry. I worked for Verizon Wireless for about three years, plus sold Sprint, AT&T, and Nextel when I worked at RadioShack. I've heard every excuse in the book about overages from customers. I get just as frustrated with you about people complaining about their bill. But not everything is as cut and dry as you'd like to think - especially with broadband cards. The majority of consumers still don't have a grasp on just how much data they're using - and what's worse is that many carriers advertise (or at least used to) these plans as "unlimited" and then in the fine print say something about 5 GB. I can't tell you how many people asked me "what's a gigabyte?" Imagine how many different interpretations a store rep might give a customer and then how the customer might still be unsure as to exactly how much data they're allowed.

Until people get better acquainted with technology these things are going to continue to happen. In the meantime I think companies should do their best to accommodate problems like this. If it's a first time thing then allow a little grace, you know? Someday you might ask for a little grace yourself.

It's definitely all the consumer's fault for not calling his provider and confirming the cost of the data rate. After all, that worked for these guys:

@Xero_Azmea: Hope you're right otherwise... MPAA on line 2!!!

@enderx: I agree that overages are black and white in the contract, yada yada yada, but it comes down to the question of why a Gb of data costs $62,000. It certainly doesn't cost the provider nearly that much, I'd be surprised at a cost of service being more than $20;
For principals sake, lets say it cost the provider $500 dollars (a rate of $0.50 cents a megabyte) for the international data transfer, where do they get off at charging an additional $61,500 dollars or a markup of 123 times the cost to them. It isn't right, plain and simple.

@chapoec: it would be $1, but i digress

More to the point, where was he that it was important enough to watch Wall-E, but that he didn't have Wi-Fi?

@MustyBuckets: If it 'isn't right', you don't do it. You're free to choose. You're responsible, not the big-guy.

@Nate128: If I made a mistake, which I have, I'd suck it up. I might try to call and appeal to something nice, but every case where something like this happens, it's always the big-guy's fault. Like the previous article in which some e-tard paid 30 something dollars in 'over-draft fees' for a starbucks fancy drink. "He paid 35 for a coffee!!' ... No, he paid 5 dollars for the coffee, and 30 dollars as a fee that he agreed upon.
These fees you agree upon. It's unfortunate that you don't read your contract/user terms when you say you agree, but you agree nonetheless.

Regardless of 'why' it costs somebody 62,000, it did. The 'why' isn't what you discover AFTER you mess up, it's what you learn about before you use anything. Especially a service. It actually costs the telecoms provider a significant amount of money for stuff like this, to rent from international infrastructures. I worked for telus, and I can tell you it's not a mere 500 dollars.

@Kogenta: You can 'think that they should operate like that', but you already know that they do not. NONE of the fault is on the big-guy.

@Nate128:

The company should just send the info to the MPAA and have them sue the guy for pirating the movie and then split the proceeds.

@JoshReflek:

WTF? You feel that companies should decide if and when to cut us off because they feel we've spent too much?

I still want to know how, with data roaming completely off on my G1, T-mobile managed to charge me $1.90 in data roaming while I was in Italy. Call going out today to find out.

@Sam Smith: Not a chance. These people have roaming agreements. The best ones with Canadian and Mexician providers.

Probably cost less than $100.

@henwy: Sprint sets a limit based on your credit when they will cut you off.

@Divals: No, NOT worth a BK. Let the account go to collections.

Send them a limited Cease Desist. Then if they sue you may be able to fight it. And even then, a judgment is a judgment.

A collection and judgment are MUCH better for your credit.

@henwy:

Not doing that is part of why the economy is in the toilet, so to some degree, yes.

@enderx: "These fees you agree upon. It's unfortunate that you don't read your contract/user terms when you say you agree, but you agree nonetheless."

I agree with you on this issue, to an extent. I do not think that companies have any obligation to justify their cost structure to customers. If you don't like the price, don't pay for it and whinge, just don't partake of the service! There is an awful lot of finger-pointing and a not a whole lot of personal responsibility.

That having been said, what does one do if access to a modern convenience like a cell phone is offered by only a few companies? And what if that oligopoly - because that's what it is - decides to act collusively and extract monopoly rents (profits)? Not to mention the unprecedented power of these companies to unilaterally alter contracts.

The free market mechanism is not allowed to function because there are government protections on the current players, barriers to market entry, and politicos in their pockets. THAT is not to the benefit of society, as only a few benefit from the suffering of many. While I do not think corporations have an obligation to serve society as a whole, they must not act counter to it.

@Sam Smith: No beepin' way. If China Mobile can get me US$6/MB roaming across the Pacific (which would come out to a third what this guy was originally charged) an American provider can get way cheaper rates cross-border.

@chris_d: You honestly think it costs $17k to download a movie in Mexico?

I see your point, enderx. But $62,000? Seriously? You don't think that's ridicules in the least bit?

I can't imagine how the ISP would warn this guy that downloading 5GB worth of data would cost him x amount without downloading the 5GB first. Maybe the ISP can put an indicator icon near his system's icons (volume, clock, network) that tells him he's roaming (similar to cell phones)?

EDIT: I meant ridiculous. Haven't woken up yet.

Come on, it didn't "cost" anyone $17,000 to transfer 4GB of data.

I agree that the guy should have known better and should have done some research, but that doesn't justify these kind of charges.

The legal system is supposed to be free of "cruel and unusual" punishment, so why should it not apply to telecoms? Let the punishment fit the crime.

It's the same crap that banks do. Instead of putting the brakes on when you're overdrawn and freezing the account, they let the whole cascade of fees happen and then just shrug their shoulders. Free money for them!

Wait....the system can keep track of the charges well enough to charge him $62,000, but it can't send up a red flag at the $500 mark and flash a message that says "Do you realy want to continue?" or just stop the download?

Again, yeah, the guy should have read his contract and should have known better, but on the other side of that, they wireless company shouldn't be laying out the red carpet and letting him rack up absolutely insane charges without letting him know about it.

The carriers are not to blame here. The tuckfards who have been willing from the beginning to pay the stupid rates are. The sheeple have spoken! They want to pay ridiculous amounts for data and SMS!

This should be pounded into the head of anyone leaving the country. When you get there, get a local card as soon as possible before you do anything with your phone.

@gStein: Best swine flu joke ever.

@Ouze: Please follow our policies we don't understand.