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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
National
Ryan Fahey

Man runs up £192,000 phone bill in just four days during family holiday in Turkey

A man nearly fainted when he was told he'd run up nearly £200k in phone charges while on a four-day family holiday in Turkey.

John Nisill, 40, from Skelmersdale in Lancashire, claims he pinged a few emails and spent just 16 minutes on the phone making calls during his trip to Marmaris in October.

But the car salesman was left stunned when his boss called to tell him to switch off his phone because the "bill seems a little high".

John said he nearly fainted when BT told him how much the 43GB of data he'd used would cost.

John is on a business contract - which doesn't alert the user when they go over the data limit (CHRIS NEILL/MAVERICK PHOTOGRAPHY)

He told The Sun : “My boss called and said you’re going to have to switch off the phone. The bill seems a little high.

“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’.”

John's boss Paul Trotter, 64, of AAA Performance in Rainford Merseyside, said he "nearly fell off my chair" when BT shared the bill.

He added: "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.”

BT said they would wipe the bill (CHRIS NEILL/MAVERICK PHOTOGRAPHY)

Because John is on a business contract, which includes just 250MB of data, no warning was given when he exceeded the limit.

Paul added: “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 spokesman for BT said they will erase the huge bill after John's story was made public.

He 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.”

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