That Time T-Mobile Hit Me With a $15,000 Phone Bill

Not too long ago, I wrote about my experience switching to T-Mobile One phone service so I could have international text and data. I’ve had this service for a while now, and I’m still happy with how it’s going. My husband and I each pay $50 for our service, and it includes unlimited talk, text, and data at home along with text and data in more than 100 countries abroad.

It’s nice to land in another country and have instant service, and I don’t miss buying and changing out SIM cards at all. The price is hard to beat for all you get and, in my experience, the international data has been fast enough. Plus, the international plan covers most countries in Europe and the Caribbean, which are my main areas of focus.

The story I’m about to share is a cautionary tale. Please note that, no matter how much I complain about this, I know that this is my fault.

As I shared a few weeks ago, my husband and I went to Bora Bora in August. It was a bucket list trip, and we thought it was amazing! When we landed in Tahiti, we were also surprised that our T-Mobile One service was working.

It worked so well, in fact, that we started using social media and answering emails. We assumed it wouldn’t work in Bora Bora, so we wanted to use our phones while we could.

Crazy enough, the service still worked in Bora Bora. While we used Wi-Fi at The Four Seasons for the bulk of our trip, we took ad uploaded pictures while we were out snorkeling and other times we were off the resort. We also used our internet access once we left the resort and headed to the Bora Bora airport on to the Tahiti airport.

Because the service worked, we assumed that French Polynesia and Bora Bora were included in our service. I could have checked to make sure, but I was so excited to be in Bora Bora I didn’t bother.

Fast forward to our arrival home at LAX and we were immediately unhappy to see our phones didn’t work. As soon as we landed, we got texts from T-Mobile saying that our service had been shut down and we needed to call.

When we called, we were informed that we had been out of network and they shut down our phones to stop us from racking up an even larger bill. The kicker is, our bill had already climbed to $15,362.87. Our bill is normally $100.

We freaked out, of course, and talked to the customer service people for a while. Initially, they said they could get our bill down to around $1,500 as a courtesy.

I complained that I believe we should have received notifications on our phones that we were out of the coverage area. T-Mobile said that they don’t send notifications and that it’s the consumer’s responsibility to check whether they’re traveling in a covered area or not.

I could probably live with paying $1,500 because it was my fault, but I went ahead and tried HUCA (hang up call again) to see if I could get someone to take the charge off my bill altogether. Fortunately, the second person I talked to was a manager and she was able to get all but $18 of overage off my bill.

Whew.

The Bottom Line: Don’t Be Like Me

Before you travel anywhere abroad, make sure to check T-Mobile’s coverage area yourself. You can do so here. Your phone will work normally almost anywhere you travel, and you won’t be notified either way.

As a personal anecdote, a guy that works in our local T-Mobile store told me that he’s seen bills high as $60,000 before in similar scenarios. One family in particular went on a week-long Caribbean cruise and assumed they were entirely covered because all the islands they were visited were in T-Mobile’s coverage age.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have coverage while their ship was at sea – and they racked up a huge bill.

Be careful out there if you use T-Mobile, or you could end up with an unpleasant surprise like I did.

Have you ever had a crazy-high phone bill? How did you deal with it?

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