Ready, Aye, Ready

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2007/12/12/cell-phone.html?ref=rss

This is an impressive one and it doesn't even include an iPhone.

Bell Canada charged a Calgary man $85,000 for data usage on his cellphone. It appears that he had an unlimited web-browsing plan (the kind that you use the poxy little browser on the cellphone with) and thought it was a data plan (the kind that, y'know, is useful.) So he used it like a highspeed wireless connection. As there's no simple way of checking usage and without expecting there to be a problem, I can laugh at his naivety but it's not something I could blame him for. At least the first $65,000. As for the next $20,000, well, he should probably have caught on.

Most people might expect that Bell would start figuring around the $5000 mark that perhaps, just perhaps, there was something odd going on and contact the user. Nope, they let it ride and then hit him with the full amount. The Bell spokeman's comment:

Bell cannot monitor the activities of every one of its customers.

Apparently not even ones who should trip every single usage monitoring tool Bell has for charging.