Unicom Hits Mobile Customer with £10K Bill for 17GB of UK Data

A 70 year old customer of Unicom (aka – Universal Utilities, VERASTAR, Kinex etc.), who claims to rarely ever use her mobile phone, has had to battle the broadband ISP after she was hit with a staggering bill of £10K for allegedly gobbling 17 GigaBytes of mobile data in a single 8 hour window.

Most mobile operators have adopted new warning systems and data add-ons, which today should make it very difficult to drum up such a huge bill for 17GB of excess data outside of an allowance (particularly as this is UK usage). For example, giffgaff charges up to 5p per MegaByte (roughly £50 per GB) and if you gobble all your data on others, like Three UK, then you’ll be offered a cheap data add-on.

The fact that most mobile plans with around 20GB of included data tend to cost roughly £20-£30 per month is another indication that, generally speaking, nobody should ever be paying thousands of pounds for having used up 17GB of data as that would be beyond ridiculous. Nevertheless This is Money has spotted just such a case, which isn’t helped by the fact that Unicom were charging 50p per MegaByte (around £500 per GB)!

Apparently the customer’s normal mobile plan only included 1GB of data and in the previous month she used just 0.4GB. The customer claims to only use her device very infrequently (past bills appear to support this) and never for any heavy data gobbling activities, although in fairness it’s also possible that automatic software or app upgrades could have suddenly gobbled up several GigaBytes (17GB still seems excessive even for that).

We should point out that it’s entirely possible to consume that much mobile data in just 8 hours and you’d only need a minimum Mobile Broadband speed of about 5Mbps, which would be easy enough to deliver on both older 3G and modern superfast 4G networks.

Unicom claims that they did issue a warning message on the same day, although the customer didn’t spot that until it was too late and the company has also refused to provide a breakdown of the data bill (admittedly there are sometimes limits to how much information can be provided). The good news is that the ombudsman has since helped the customer to get her bill reduced to £1,100 +vat.

A Spokesperson for Unicom said:

“We do not market products for personal use, [but] we do allow customers to keep contracts in place if they retire, as was the case with Mrs Howkins. Our contract is clear that she is responsible for her usage and is liable for data charges. As a gesture of goodwill, we are substantially reducing the charges.

We are reliant on our Mobile Virtual Network Enabler, Transatel, for the breakdown of customer usage and, whilst they insist that the data was used, they have been unable to either provide this information themselves or procure it from BT / EE, the ultimate network provider.”

Unfortunately Unicom has somewhat of a chequered history in this industry and in 2015 they were fined £200,000 by Ofcom after being found to have mislead consumers (here and here). So far the company has not proposed to make any changes to their systems in order to prevent others being stung in the same way again in the future.