Andrew Alty ran a small curtains business in Manchester and took his family to Marrakech for a trip. His daughter spent about eight hours over the holiday doing the most ordinary thing imaginable on a phone: scrolling TikTok.
The bill came to £42,000 roughly $57,000. More than $5,000 an hour, for watching short videos.
How a TikTok Phone Bill Hits $57,000
The charges came from data roaming outside Europe. Alty had bought a business mobile contract through the electronics retailer Currys, with service provided by O2. Buried in that contract was a clause he says was never clearly explained: it opted him out of the “rest-of-world” data cap that normally stops exactly this kind of runaway charge.
No cap meant no ceiling. Every minute of video streamed at full international roaming rates, and nothing stopped the meter.
The bill arrived in two waves. The first £22,000 landed while the family was still in Morocco. Alty assumed it was a mistake or a hack; the number simply didn’t look real. He tried calling O2 from the road on his way to the desert and got nowhere. Then he got home, and a second bill for another £20,000 showed up.
The part that should worry every traveler
Here’s what makes this more than a freak story: the phone company watched it happen and said nothing. In Alty’s words, they made no effort to inform the family and just let the charges pile up. There was no text warning, no automatic cutoff, no “you’ve hit $500 in roaming charges” alert the kind of thing most people assume exists as a backstop. It didn’t, because his specific contract had switched it off.
He fought it and technically, he lost
This is the twist the viral version usually leaves out. Alty escalated to the UK’s Financial Ombudsman Service, arguing the data-cap opt-out was never properly explained. The ombudsman ruled against him on jurisdiction: explaining the contract was Currys’ responsibility, not O2’s, and it couldn’t rule against the network provider directly.
So the £42,000 wasn’t waived because a regulator forced it. It was waived because Alty spent two months complaining and the story became a public embarrassment. Both Currys and O2 eventually wrote it off in full. Persistence and press coverage got the result the formal complaint process wouldn’t.
That’s the uncomfortable lesson underneath the eye-popping number. The safety net people assume protects them regulators, ombudsmen, automatic caps didn’t catch this. What worked was refusing to go away and getting a newspaper involved.
The scariest detail is how normal the trigger was. Nobody in this story did anything reckless. There was no crypto scam, no premium-rate line, no stolen phone a teenager watched videos on her own phone the same way she would at home.
It’s not a one-off
Alty’s provider isn’t an outlier by reputation. UK regulator Ofcom’s data for July through September 2025 listed O2 among the most complained-about mobile providers, alongside Sky Mobile and Three with a large share of the complaints about how problems were handled once they arose.
And the same trap exists for American travelers. US carriers sell international plans with wildly different default settings, and roaming in countries outside your plan’s coverage can rack up charges just as fast. The fix is boring and free: before you fly, confirm your carrier’s international roaming rates for your specific destination, set a data cap or turn roaming off entirely, and use Wi-Fi or a local eSIM for anything data-heavy. Eight hours of TikTok on hotel Wi-Fi costs nothing. On uncapped roaming, it cost this family a house deposit.
