O2 warning after man sent £42,000 bill ‘he thought was a mistake’

Andrew Alty thought O2 bill was a mistake.

An O2 phone bill warning has been issued after a man received a £42,000 bill for data roaming charges following a holiday to Morocco. Andrew Alty thought O2 bill was a mistake.

Andrew, a small business owner, as in Marrakech when he received a bill for £22,000 from network provider O2. “I was on my way to the desert,” he told the Telegraph.

“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,” he said. Once he returned home, he received another bill for £20,000.

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It emerged his phone deal, which he bought via the retailer Currys and was provided by O2, contained a clause that left data roaming charges outside Europe uncapped.

His daughter’s use of the social media app TikTok resulted in a bill of more than £5,000 an hour.

“There’s no way they should be able to charge that,” Alty said.

“They made no effort to inform us, and just allowed the charges to accrue. I don’t understand how they expect any small business to pay that sort of bill.”

He added: “It’s taken up such a huge part of my life over the past two months. It’s ridiculous. [The customer service teams] have not been helpful; the calls have just ended in frustration and despair.”

Alty contacted the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), and complained that the “opt-out of rest-of-world data cap” included in his contract was not explained to him by O2.

A spokesperson for O2 said: “We’re aware of Mr Alty’s complaint, which the ombudsman ruled was a sales process dispute with his account provider Currys. We understand that this is now resolved, with Currys agreeing to waive all charges.”

Currys said the charges were removed “given the scale and circumstances surrounding the case”.