A 14-year-old Bath schoolgirl managed to rack up a £3,800 phone bill while using her mobile on a five-day family holiday to New York.
Casey Snook, a pupil at Ralph Allen School, had been taken on the trip by her mum Kate Snook, who had organised it as a birthday present for fiancée Rob Norman.
While she was there, Casey received a text from Orange saying her bill had already reached £320, but after that she says she thought she was accessing the internet via free wi-fi.
However, last week her father Victor Snook, who pays for the phone contract which usually costs between £50 and £60 a month, was informed by his bank that he was overdrawn.
He was stunned to discover that Orange had taken £3,800 out of his account for the charges Casey had accumulated accessing Facebook on her iPhone while abroad.
Ms Snook, who lives in Combe Down, said the cost of the phone bill had ended up costing more than the £2,900 holiday itself.
She said: "She has been in tears over this, I was in tears myself when I was on the phone to Orange.
"She is embarrassed and very, very upset, because we are going to have to pay this huge amount of money."
Orange said it automatically capped overseas spending at £41 a day, but Casey had texted the firm to ask for this to be lifted.
Her parents, who did not know she had made the request until they spoke to the network provider this week, said she was too young to realise what she was doing.
Ms Snook, 42, said she was angry about the way Orange had handled the situation and believes they should have received warnings when the cost of the phone bill was escalating.
She said: "What really got my goat is that they didn't text Casey or Victor to say that it has reached this amount or that, letting them know it had gone over £1,000.
"And then the thing that really got to us was they took it straight out of his bank account, which means he has got charged for being overdrawn."
Casey's parents, who are not together, have agreed to split the cost of the phone bill and have arranged a payment plan with Orange to pay off the debt.
"I know it is our fault," Ms Snook said, "I accept that. But they are a big company and I thought they would've helped us out in some way once they knew this was a 14-year-old girl.
"Yes, perhaps we should never have let her have a contract phone, but even so this is an extortionate amount of money."
An Orange spokesman said it did everything it could to warn customers about overseas charges and protect them from that cost.
He said: "We know our customers want to use their smartphones while on holiday without the worry of a big bill at the end. That's why we offer a number of services, such as roaming bundles, which allow travellers to use data overseas and control the cost.
"All Orange customers have a number of protections in place – customers are even automatically opted in to a roaming data cap which limits their charges to £49 for a set amount of data.
"Customers receive warning texts to alert them of their data usage and we have an app that helps them monitor data usage, and opt in to a data bundle if needed.
"In this instance the customer received numerous text alerts which updated them on the roaming costs for the USA, and also updated them on their data usage.
"Once they had reached the limit of their data bundle, the customer actively opted out of our roaming data cap so that they could continue to use data, effectively removing the in-built protection from large data roaming bills."
The spokesman added that as the account was in Mr Snook's name, it did not know it was a 14-year-old girl using the phone.
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