Bill shock - my experience

[Daddydoink]

As you may or may not know, I recently borrowed a Community "Try the Tech" phone.  This all went swimmingly and the phone was returned.

I've just had my phone bill - despite the mobile data being turned off much of the time, sticking to wifi and monitoring it using the apps on the phone, my business phone bill has just come in... and the phone consumed 8GB in data.  Yes, you read that right.  Tune of £200 inc VAT for a bill that is normally about £50.

I've registered it as bill shock, namely because there was no warnings via text (which are offered to O2 customers abroad) that it was suddenly consuming data, nor do we have realtime spend abilities as a business account - what was worse for us was that the sim card was only activated for this trial (i.e. its a usually dormant SIM), so the fact it was suddenly in use should have triggered something at O2, in our opinion, in case it had been stolen or fraudulently picked up.  Had we known there was little to no data on the phone connection, we'd have even put a bolt on or two on there to sort it for the month.

It has left a bit of a sour feeling now about my own experience.  I'm awaiting to hear what the outcome is of our bill shock registration.

[hivis]

Thanks for reply.
The person in question has denied it all and 02 have provided usages times and some premium rate "games" text numbers which is also being denied outright by the supposed user. I guess 02 will produce more in depth info maybe like geolocation etc so we can nail down where it came from and whether the sim was used. I mean is it possible the sim was "hijacked" in some way ? the user is saying he has not used it, and he is a well respected director

[MI5]

In all honesty, we very rarely see real proven billing errors from O2.
Is it possible that your Director is allowing someone else access to the device?

Have a look at this thread too in case there is a company scamming premium text charges from the account

https://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Pay-Monthly-and-Pay-Go/Have-you-fallen-for-or-been-conned-into-a-premi...

[hivis]

I think you have answered the question with the "rare" billing errors maybe one of his kids or something. Thanks for the links and info guys, Ill delve further.

One last thing, I sent our account handler an email asking if its possible they could "geo locate" the device at the times it was used, do you think this is possible.

Cheers

[MI5]

Live location is possible but I'm not sure if it's recorded historically.

[gmarkj]

They "might" be able to tell if you made calls or sent texts.
Alternatively if you have access to it you can use location history (if on android and have google maps installed) to see where it has been.