Man Racks Up £192,000 Work Phone Bill On Holiday In Turkey

John Nisill was told by BT that he’d used 43GB of data whilst on his short break and says he 'nearly fainted' when he was told the amount.

Worse still, it was his work phone.

Nisill reckons that he didn’t do anything but answer a couple of emails and make around 16 minutes of phone calls during his trip to Marmaris last October, but still received the whopping bill.

“I said ‘What is it?’ He said '£100,000'. Next day he phoned back and said, ‘Definitely switch it off, it’s now £192,000’.”

His boss, 64-year-old Paul Trotter of AAA Performance in Rainford, explained: “BT phoned and I nearly fell off my chair when the bloke said how much.

"It’s obviously a computer error.

"I’ve had a look at the bill and it shoots up £80 every 30 seconds or so. That’s just not possible.

“Even if John was downloading Hollywood blockbusters, there’s no way he’d have gone that much over.”

Paul added that, quite predictably, his company can’t afford to pay the hefty phone bill.

The contract that John is on gives him 250MB of data, but because it’s a business contract he gets no warning when he is nearing that limit.

Still, 40-odd gigabytes over there is still something you might notice.

Paul continued: “I was worried at first but I’m confident BT will realise it’s just an error.

“John had a great holiday so there’s no harm done, and we’ve even managed to laugh about it.”

A spokesperson for BT has since confirmed that they will waive the bill.

They said: “We understand this is a very significant bill to receive, so, on this occasion, we are waiving the surplus roaming charges.

“In this case, the customer was on a BT Business mobile plan which included a monthly data allowance of 250MB. When travelling in Turkey he far exceeded his agreed limit by consuming 46GB of data.

"We alerted him several times that he had exceeded his data allowances, that standard roaming charges were in place and that he was incurring high usage.

"Our records show that the customer chose not to include a data cap as part of his plan.

“We always recommend customers opt for a roaming cap, as the vast majority of our business customers do. We also urge customers to pay attention to any notifications we send them around their data allowance.”