British Kid Racks Up £3,300 Bill Watching Six Episodes of SpongeBob on iPhone

Remember back before everyone had a smartphone and a data plan? If you ever accidentally hit the Internet button on your cell it was a desperate, finger-pressing race to end the connection, lest you end up paying about a billion dollars for every second connected. Well, it turns out these surprisingly high bills are still around, you just have to be a bit more creative.

Enter 10-year-old Felix Sturdy of London, who streamed six episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants via Netflix on his father’s iPhone during the rainy portion of a recent camping trip. After returning, Dad was hit with a £3,300 ($5,068) bill.

To put that amount in perspective, not only does it break down to £550 ($845) per episode, or £1,650 ($2,535) per hour, but it totaled about 60 times the entire cost of the camping excursion to the Kent countryside.

Unfortunately, the father, Conan Sturdy, had gone over his data allowance by a whopping 5.4GBs, and was charged by carrier BT at a rate of £0.5 per megabyte (£612 per gigabyte.) To compare, Sturdy and I pay about the same amount per month, both receiving 2GB of data. The difference? When my AT&T-run iPhone goes over, I only pay $10 per extra GB, which is average, and I receive several messages telling me this ahead of time.

“I did get a text from BT, but it just said I was about to go over my allowance, there wasn’t a mention of cost and previously they had just cut off my data when I exceeded my allowance,” the elder Sturdy explained. “I knew I would have to pay a little bit more in the month because he was watching it, but when I got a bill saying it was over £3,000 I thought there must be some sort of mistake.”

Sturdy quickly phoned BT to find out why his service was not disconnected, only to be informed that the department responsible for that feature no longer existed.

He was then told the company would put his bill on hold while they looked into the matter.

A BT spokesman has since said the company will waive Mr Sturdy’s bill, adding, “We’re arranging for Mr Sturdy to switch to a more suitable mobile data allowance.”

[via The Daily Mail]