B.C. couple gets big cellphone bill… says Bell “made us scared of our phone”

Yet another huge cellphone bill has surfaced. B.C. couple Daniel and Kate Methot bought themselves a Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant back in October and started to racked up charges into the thousands of dollars.

Here’s a gist of what happened: Apparently they received a text from Bell that they are using excessive data and warned them of their usage. In December their bill totaled $3,515.13 with 30 hours of data usage in one 24-hour period. Daniel Methot first thought it was himself who ran up the charges by having apps run in the background. He contacted Bell and said there must be a problem as he could never have used that much data. “I basically deleted every app that I had downloaded and just started to be a lot more conservative with the data use, and that’s all I could do”.

Bell started to looking into their account and immediately credited $3,330.88 from their bill for a “known” software problem. However, right back on track the next couple days they received another bill with the amount of $1,204. So Daniel and Kate have hired a lawyer to help them and stated that “they basically made us scared of our phone… We just stopped using it. We shut it off”.

Bell spokesperson Jason Laszlo believes that it could be possible that somebody has tapped into their device and is using their internet. “I’m still going to pursue the deeper, more intensive technical investigation into the Methots’ data usage and am hopeful that this will yield some answers… The one possibility that kept being raised was that the device’s mobile hot-spot feature may be on. This feature turns the device into a wireless modem which can connect up to three other devices via Wi-Fi.”

Source: CBC