One family’s vacation explodes into financial disaster, all thanks to a common phone activity

Andrew Alty, a business owner from Manchester, England, recently found himself staring down a colossal $55,000 phone bill, all because his daughter was watching TikTok while they were traveling. The good news is, after a bit of a battle, that massive charge has now been completely waived.

According to Dailymail, this eye-watering sum wasn’t from a shopping spree on TikTok Shop, which, let’s be honest, can be tempting enough. Instead, it was purely from data usage. Alty’s daughter, an avid TikTok user, was simply scrolling through videos on the popular platform while the family was vacationing in Morocco. It really shows you just how quickly data can add up, especially when you’re venturing outside your usual service area. This is better than some bad vacations we’ve heard of, but still bad overall.

Alty, who runs a curtains business, made the shocking discovery when he and his family returned home. He was hit with two separate and exorbitant phone bills that totaled around £42,000, which converts to approximately $56,000. Imagine his sheer panic and disbelief. He naturally assumed there had to be some kind of huge mistake.

This was not the stress-free vacation they had bargained for

“I was on my way to the desert,” Alty explained, recounting his attempts to address the issue. “I made multiple attempts to call O2, but there wasn’t much I could do. I could only assume there had been a glitch, or the account had been hacked.” It turns out his daughter had been engrossed in TikTok for about eight hours, on and off, during their trip. That means each hour of scrolling was costing him a mind-boggling £5,000. 

The reason for these astronomical costs boiled down to a specific, and frankly, quite scary, clause in Alty’s phone contract. It allowed for uncapped data roaming whenever he was outside of Europe. So, unfortunately for him, the charges were technically permissible under the terms of his agreement. 

Luckily for Alty, there was a happy ending to this data drama. After an investigation into the case, the phone provider eventually decided to waive the entire bill. 

Alty didn’t hold back his frustration with the situation. “They (the phone provider) made no effort to inform us, and just allowed the charges to accrue,” he stated. “I don’t understand how they expect any small business to pay that sort of bill.”