&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "British family racks up Rs 50 lakh phone bill after daughter spends hours watching TikTok")
Watching TikToks on holiday costs a British family £42,000 in mobile phone bills. Initially, when they received the bill, they wondered whether someone had hacked their number. However, turns out their daughter's craze for TikToks was to blame. The Alty family were on a trip to Marrakech when they received the first part of the enormous bill. Andrew Alty runs a curtains business, and the O2 bill left him shell-shocked. He later realised that his daughter watched TikTok for eight hours on the trip, and this was responsible for the huge bill. He had purchased a contract through his small business before the trip via electrical retailer Currys. One of the clauses that he missed was that data roaming outside Europe was uncapped. He was charged more than £5,000 for every hour his daughter spent on the social media platform, totalling £42,000.
Andrew is angry at the service provider for letting them rack up the bill without informing them. He told The Telegraph, “There’s no way they should be able to charge that. They made no effort to inform us and just allowed the charges to accrue. I don’t understand how they expect any small business to pay that sort of bill.”
Andrew Alty thought it was a glitch
Like anyone else, Andrew thought that the first bill of £22,000 must have been a mistake. He assumed that this happened because of some kind of glitch and tried contacting O2. "I could only assume there had been a glitch, or the account had been hacked," he said. After the family returned home, they got the second bill amounting to £20,000. This is when he understood what had happened. The Alty family calls it "ridiculous" and has spent two months trying to get the issue fixed.
Data roaming charges outside a country can go pretty high
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British citizens are charged for data roaming outside the United Kingdom every time their phone connects to a network. Before Brexit, they could enjoy free roaming inside the European Union. Some providers still offer free or nominal rates. But outside the UK, if you do not place a data cap, the bills can run wild. Thankfully, the family was able to get Currys and O2 to waive the charges.
