$201,000 Cell Phone Bill: Celina Aarons, Florida Woman, Receives Shocking T-Mobile Bill

MIAMI (Associated Press / The Huffington Post) -- A South Florida woman got a shock when she opened a recent cell phone bill: she owed $201,000.

It was no mistake.

Celina Aarons has her two deaf-mute brothers on her plan. They communicate by texting and use their phones to watch videos. Normally, that's not a problem. Aarons has the appropriate data plan and her bill is about $175.

But her brothers spent two weeks in Canada and Aarons never changed to an international plan. Her brothers sent over 2,000 texts and also downloaded videos, sometimes racking up $2,000 in data charges.

When Aarons read the bill -- all 43 pages of it -- she realized she owed $201,005.44.

"I was freaking out," Aarons told the news station WSVN. "I was shaking, crying, I couldn't even talk that much on the phone. I was like my life is over!"

Thankfully, T-mobile agreed to lower the bill to a more manageable $2,500 and gave Aarons six months to pay up, WSVN reports.

In 2006, a Malaysian man reportedly received a phone bill totaling $218 trillion for calls made on a number he thought he had disconnected after his father's death.

Comments

[RCnDC]

11:37 AM on 10/21/2011

Just report them to the FTC..... I bet they'll change their tune real fast.... Anything to ensure the FTC will approve the ATT / T-Mobile merger...

[Cody29]

06:43 AM on 10/21/2011

Brothers need to pay up for the mistake.Sis needs to stop putting others on her phone contract.In the end she signed the contract and whether 2k or 200k she is responsible.

[mexamerican]

12:39 PM on 10/22/2011

Oooooo, ur a real tuff guy!

[Eileenla]

05:40 AM on 10/23/2011

Sure...because the cost to T mobile for delivering those messages was....what? Perhaps a few hundred dollars at most? When dud fleecing folks become okay just because it's legal? Whatever happened to baseline morality?

[Nadavsay]

10:00 PM on 10/20/2011

Whenever I go to other countries I make sure to turn off my 3G and not to text because everyone I know including myself knows that it's 10x the amount when you roam so it's her fault

[csmomo]

06:06 PM on 10/20/2011

You think anyone in the known world is going to pay such a phone bill?

The telephone carriers should have their customers set a limit on the charges that
can be made on their phones. But of course they want all the profit they can get.

Moral of the story: DON'T GIVE YOUR KIDS CELL PHONES UNTIL THEY CAN PAY T HEIR OWN BILLS.

[see-ellen2001]

04:21 PM on 10/20/2011

When will the media catch up and stop calling Deaf people "deaf-mute". The term is no longer used. Many Deaf choose to not use their voice, or may have never learned to voice. Mute they are not.

[opiniongirl18]

09:32 AM on 10/20/2011

thats why my parents have strait talk phones they got bad news before they cancel the pfones and got strait talk is only 45 dollars a month you by you card my phone is only 30 dollars card i see my friends everyday so i do not use my phone much just get a strait talk phone you by the card and nomore bills

[Patrick Sawyer]

04:02 PM on 10/20/2011

I can't even tall what your point is. Please learn how to capitalize, spell, punctuate, and use proper grammar. Thank you.

[TooKrunk]

04:29 PM on 10/20/2011

Lighten up bozo, this is the internet, not a spelling bee.

[csmomo]

06:07 PM on 10/20/2011

You can't "TALL" what it is?????

[runswithscissors]

01:06 PM on 10/19/2011

She definitely should have been smarter, but let's not sit here and pretend like T-Mobile cut the bill out of the kindness of their hearts. They knew that if they didn't cut it, they wouldn't see a dime of that $201,000. They'd also likely be dragged into a very public battle, where even if the customer was completely at fault, T-Mobile still risks losing the PR war. Cutting the bill made them an easy $2500 for something that costs essentially nothing to provide.

That said, I still probably won't ever do business with T-Mobile. When you contract with a communications company, part of what you are paying for is customer service. Why didn't anyone notice that a customer with a fixed plan suddenly started accruing costs at an almost impossible pace? They should have at the very least suspected theft, and should have tried to make contact with Aarons (and no, a text message sent to the very phone suspected of being stolen does not qualify as a serious attempt). I know the "personal responsibility" crowd doesn't want to hear this, but they like to forget that businesses have obligations as well. When their employees are this oblivious to what should be obvious red flags, they don't deserve anyone's business.

[eliteproxy]

09:57 PM on 10/19/2011

i agree with this comment. When all of a sudden my credit card gets charged over my average my card is halted and in case of AMEX I get a phone call right away!

[runswithscissors]

11:30 AM on 10/20/2011

Yeah AMEX did the same for me when I had to put my tuition on my credit card. I rarely spend more than $100 a month on it, so the $7000 charge immediately caught their attention. You'd think T-Mobile would at some point notice an account accruing an average of $6700 a day.

[Stacy Marston]

11:13 AM on 10/20/2011

It was still very cool of T-mobile to reduce the bill, especially as much as they did. They didn't have, but they did it anyways.

I was a customer service rep for Verizon for a few years. I watched bills with valid charges as high as $5-7K stand without a penny being credited. The biggest bill I ever saw was for over $12K and nope, Verizon didn't take so much as a penny off the amount due.

[csmomo]

06:08 PM on 10/20/2011

They might as well reduce it, they knew they wouldn't get it anyway.

[lullu]

12:06 PM on 10/19/2011

I am amazed T-Mobile reduced the bill by that much because they are far from accommodating. They should have written off the whole thing. Obviously when they knew the story was going viral they had second thoughts. ATT are much more reasonable under these circumstances. Putting limits on data plans has been a lottery win for phone companies.

[Last Progressive Texan]

03:18 PM on 10/20/2011

Wasn't AT&T the telco that charged a man around $25,000 for downloading Pixar's Cars movie in mexico? That sure doesn't sound very reasonable to me. Nor did they immediately knock anything off. It took a rather public battle to get them to do anything at all. AT&T caps their phone and home data plans across the board, but so far as I'm aware you can still rack up additional charges if you keep downloading beyond the cap. I was in Canada earlier this year and after an hour of phone use I had already incurred $30 worth of roaming data charges. Sprint supposedly has an automatic message that goes at when you hit $50 but I had already turned off my roaming data option by then. There is really no reason anyone should have a phone bill in the thousands of dollars. If it hits $50 in a single day it's time for an emergency message to go out. If it hits $100 in a week another message. If it hits $500 in a month then it should auto-halt all charges until the customer confirms they know how much they're paying. In a progressive society unlimited millionaire sized expense phone accounts would be opt-in instead of opt-out.

[Nic the wonder puppy]

11:03 AM on 10/19/2011

I was not there. Besides do you know how hard it is for me to use a cell phone.
PAWS

[aristocat12]

09:52 AM on 10/19/2011

This si what happens if you put other people on your plan, I have my children on but they never use that much they are very trustworthy. You will be paying this bill off for a long time.

[Megsie]

04:29 PM on 10/19/2011

You have your kids, who you trust. She has her brothers, who she trusts. The brothers didnt misuse the phones at all. This is a case of corporate greed, not one of abuse of the cell plan.

[kickserv]

09:17 AM on 10/19/2011

Yep, personal responsibility is gone. Do whatever you want complain you didn't understand the rule, get the press behind you, than get the government behind. Than these businesses have to spend 10's of million to put in safety stuff that tell you your about to do something stupid. Yep, personal responsibility is gone.

[AcesHighSays]

11:52 AM on 10/19/2011

Careful, the beverage you are about to consume is extremely hot

[Last Progressive Texan]

03:26 PM on 10/20/2011

Careful, the beverage you're about to consume is MUCH hotter than any similar beverage in any other restaurant in the entire country. Third degree burns will result (worst level possible). You will require multiple days in the hospital while skin grafts costing tens-of-thousands-of-dollars are applied to what is left of your badly burned and disfigured thighs. Your own country will ridicule you for driving while opening your beverage even though you were actually in the passenger seat of a motionless vehicle. Major media and political movements backed by conglomerates will result in new laws that drastically reduce judicial judgments to figures small enough for very large corporations to write off as the cost of doing business. Enjoy!

[invirginia]

08:49 AM on 10/19/2011

How generous of T Mobile to reduce it to only $2,500. They should have taken the high road and dismissed ALL of the charges incurred in Canada. It costs their company NOTHING.

[BrainsandBoobs]

08:35 AM on 10/19/2011

Canadian phone system is all regulated by the government. They are shockingly more money than US phones - t-mobile had to pay rogers or another Canadian service. They were very nice to reduce the bill - but they didnt have to - people need to take responsibility.

[rjzii]

04:32 PM on 10/19/2011

Even all of that said, it likely wouldn't cost that much money. There is a difference between making a profit and gouging the customer because you can and then saying they should have known better. Most likely the $2,500 still has a profit on what they had to pay for the cross carrier fees.

Plus, it doesn't help that at the in terms of actual network bandwidth, text messages are nominal (a one-minute phone call uses up the same amount of network capacity as 600 text messages) and tend to be a major profit center for most companies.

[OrwellianOne]

07:58 AM on 10/19/2011

Why would anyone think they're not going to be charged insane amounts when using their cell phone outside of the US?

Utter and ridiculous ignorance. She's lucky T-mobile was nice.

[csmomo]

06:11 PM on 10/20/2011

What were they going to do if she didn't pay any of it?

[KIVPossum]

07:57 AM on 10/19/2011

You have to know where you are and what your charges are going to be. I forgot to switch one time and discovered my international calls were costing me $16 a minute. Fortunately I only used about 7 or 8 minutes before I realized