T-Mobile Customer 'Shaken' by $200,000 Bill

A T-Mobile customer in Florida was "shaking and crying" when she received a phone bill of more than $200,000 last month, largely because her younger brother didn't turn off data roaming during a vacation in Canada.

Celina Aarons has a T-Mobile family plan she shares with her five younger siblings, and usually pays around $175 a month, Miami's WSVN reports. But last month Aarons' younger brother, a college student named Shamir, who is legally deaf, spent two weeks in Canada where he rang up a 43-page, $201,000 cell phone bill. During his trip Shamir had texted more than 2,000 times, at $0.20/text according to T-Mobile's international messaging rates, and downloaded videos at a price of $10 per MB (so that five-minute YouTube video could cost you around $100). T-Mobile agreed to reduce her phone bill to $2,500 and gave her six months to pay it off. A T-Mobile spokeswoman later said that the carrier sent an alert to Shamir's phone when it hit $50, $100, $200, $500 in data roaming, as per its usual policy.