Holidays in Morocco cost him 48 thousand euros in roaming. It was the daughter’s (and TikTok’s) fault

British Andrew Alty thought the bill to his telecommunications operator was a mistake, but his daughter’s use of TikTok led to astronomical charges, without any limit, accumulating. But everything ended well…

Returning home after the holidays, a small British businessman found himself faced with a bill for £42,000, around 48 thousand euroswhich almost bankrupted him.

As stated Andrew Altythe value of the invoice skyrocketed, after her daughter accumulated data roaming charges while the family was on vacation in Morocco.

Owner of a curtains company, Alty was in Marrakech when he received an initial invoice for 22,000 pounds from his operator, O₂, but initially assumed that it was an error.

“I was on my way to the desert,” he told . “I tried to contact O₂ several times, but there was little I could do. I could only assume that there was a failure, or that the account had been hacked“, he explained.

After returning home, he received yet another invoice, this time for £20,000, and the dimension of the problem became evident.

Alty had concluded the telecommunications contract on behalf of your companybased in Manchester. The contract, purchased through a retailer and provided by O₂, contained a clause that left shipping charges data roaming outside Europe without any maximum limit.

Roaming costs apply when cell phones connect to a mobile network to access the internet outside of their home country and have sometimes left tourists struggling with large invoices.

In Portugalthe four operators (MEO, Vodafone, NOS and NOWO) follow EU rules and allow customers use your tariff data in the EEA Zone (European Union + Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, United Kingdom, Moldova and Ukraine) as if they were on national territory, but they charge an extra cost for using mobile data in countries outside the EEA Zone.

In the case of Alty’s contract, her daughter’s use of the social media app TikTok, Tallulahended up resulting in a bill of over £5,000 per hour — around 5.700 euros for every 60 minutes of data consumed.

“In no way should they be able to charge this“, says Alty. “They made no effort to inform us and they simply let the charges pile up. I can’t understand how they expect a small company to be able to pay an invoice of that amount.”

“This took over a huge part of my life over the last two months. It’s absurd. The customer support teams were not helpful at all; the calls all ended in frustration and despair,” he added.

Alty contacted the UK Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), and complained that the “exclusion of data limit outside Europe” included in your contract had not been explained to him by O₂.

The FOS concluded that although O₂ was the provider of the mobile service, it was the retailer responsible for explanations relating to the contract and decisions on spending limits, so that the FOS was not in a position to intervene.

After being contacted by the Telegraph, the retailer and O₂ ended up agree to waive payment of charges.

“We are aware of Mr Alty’s complaint, in relation to which the ombudsman concluded that this was a dispute with your account provider regarding the sales process,” said an O₂ spokesperson. “As far as we know, the matter has now been resolved,”

The retailer confirmed that “taking into account the size and circumstances case”, the charges billed to Alty had been annulled. As William Shakespeare would say, It’s okay, that’s what ends well…