Family turns off data roaming yet still receives $700 bill from AT&T

As we have discussed on a number of previous occasions, consumers around the world continue to be hit with unexpected and expensive data roaming charges, commonly referred to as bill shock. As we have seen with story after story after story, consumers are hit with high bills (sometimes ranging in the thousands of dollars) that they did not expect.

While bill shock has gotten less common in the last few years due to the FCC forcing major wireless providers to provide billing alerts to customers (even though they HEAVILY resisted such alerts), it still occurs to many around the world. Sadly, carriers almost always refuse to work with the customers when receiving such bills unless the customers goes to the media and complains.

Enter a Mesa family who went on a cruise from Arizona to Alaska in mid-August. Before they left on their trip, the family turned off the data roaming options on their phones.

Yet after the cruise, rather than receive their usually $170 monthly wireless bill, the family was sent a $700 bill from AT&T due to data roaming fees. When the family contacted AT&T, they were blown off and told to deal with it (as what usually happens).

As AZFamily points out, the families had in fact turned off their phone’s data usage but one of their phones continued to roam and look for a signal anyway while the family was cruising in the ocean.

So, the family contacted an Arizona TV station and asked for their help. Want to take a guess what happened?

“3 On Your Side contacted AT&T which immediately looked into the matter and you know what, the company eliminated and waived almost the entire amount in fees. Jorge credits 3 On Your Side.” – AZFamily.com

As CruiseFever.net notes, most carriers charge $15 per mb of data so any sort of data usage can be extremely expensive.