Stolen SIM card and $200,000 3G data bill send Tasmanian woman to jail

What is the biggest cellphone bill that you have ever come across? A thousand dollars? Two thousand, maybe? Well, a Tasmanian lady achieved the unthinkable and totaled the astonishing amount of about $200,000 worth of 3G data and phone calls over a period of three months without even knowing what she was really doing.

It all started when Kylie Monks, the protagonist of our story, met a guy on the internet, known only as Freeman, and received a SIM card from him to surf the web with. Little did she know that the SIM card was actually stolen from a power meter and belonged to the local Aurora electric power company. Every single megabyte of traffic was adding $2 to the company's phone bill, which is why only three months later, Aurora received the whopping $193,187.43 in wireless data charges.

Even though she didn't know that the SIM card was stolen, Kylie Monks had to serve her time of six months in The Big House. Kylie admits that besides using the free internet for casual stuff, she also downloaded dozens of movies, which were burned onto CDs and sent over to Mr Freeman. That probably explains where the nearly 100 gigabytes of 3G traffic accumulated from.

The moral of the story? Do not talk to shady fellows online, especially if they are trying to give you free things.

source: The Mercury via Gizmodo