Family using T-Mobile goes on overseas vacation, receives $78K monthly bill

Imagine checking out how much your next payment to T-Mobile will be at the end of this month via AutoPay and the amount staring you in the face is $78,240.61. That is what happened to the father of a Reddit subscriber with the username Zolsoh, who shared an image of the family's monthly T-Mobile bill as it appeared on the carrier's app. Apparently, the family just came back from vacation and got hit by roaming charges.

Here's the deal. If you are not on a plan with Simple Global, T-Mobile will charge $15 per MB. Folks, that works out to $15,000 for each GB consumed. The first thing that this family needs to do is disable the AutoPay or else they will get charged with overdraft fees from their bank. And while the magnitude of the bill is certainly shocking, this sort of thing has happened to others using their phone while on a business trip or vacation.

Reddit member letrsjustscream wrote, "I had ATT years ago and I went to Spain. I had my phone in airplane mode the entire time and only ever turned on wifi. My bill was close to 1k. When questioned they said it was roaming fees and wouldn’t correct it." Another Redditor, utspg1980, regaled us with his experience as he wrote, "I'd gone to a couple different countries back to back and each time I landed, I'd use my phone to get around until I could get a local sim card. Every time I did I would get this text from Verizon "Hi there, we see that you're now in Japan. We just want to let you know that Japan is not covered as part of your plan, however, we have a partnership with the local companies so you will pay an international roaming rate of 10c/Mb" or something like that."

He continued, "So I'd use my Verizon sim for like 24 hours and it'd cost me like $5 of roaming, which I was fine with. Then I go to Cambodia. I get a text from Verizon and say to myself "oh it's that same old text about roaming, I'll just swipe it away." Well it turns out that text informed me that they do NOT have a partnership with the Cambodia providers, so using my Verizon sim there would cost me something like 10 DOLLARS per Mb, not 10c. I ran up $1000 in a day. Verizon was actually pretty nice about it and cut the bill in half for me. They had no obligation to do so."

Here's one last story from a Reddit user with the name Odd_Cryptographer577 who ran up a sizeable £25,000/$31,000 of roaming charges with wireless provider EE while using his phone for seven hours. The carrier raised its customer's credit limit to £250,000/$316,000 which he hit the next day. Luckily, the customer said that things worked out okay. "Fortunately, they were actually able to fix the underlying issue and remove the quarter of a million-pound charge on my account."

There were many others who posted their stories about receiving an unexpectedly high monthly mobile bill for roaming. If you are planning on going overseas, check with your carrier to see what roaming charges you might face while away. Several Redditors suggested switching your phone to Airplane Mode to shut down the radios on the device when you land outside of the U.S. Once you're able to install a SIM card from a local carrier in the country you're visiting, you can turn your phone's radios back on.