U.S. Soldier in Afghanistan Got $16,000 AT&T Bill

[f-14]

[citation][nom]roadrunner343[/nom] ......Now secondly...This PFC is a joke and should be ashamed of his stupidity. He should also be ashamed of taking advantage of his status as a soldier to abuse his wireless carrier. I can almost GAURANTEE you that he knew calling home cost a buttload of money on a cell phone......Don't get me wrong, I want to see a change in AT&T's crappy policies and I hope this story hurts their image a little, but I definitely hope this kid's chain of command absolutely destroys him for his stupidity too.[/citation]
+1 man, this is just another act foriegners pull alot. dealt with it myself and thank the powers that be i had a supervisor or mgr. come over when i was dealing with one. the rest of the world trys to get everything for free or bargain for unrealistic good deals. i gotta laugh tho, i bet those afgani bill collectors for the cell phone company whose network they connected thru will probably hunt them down right out in the field and make them pay for their end at the barrel of an AK. will be a whole new brand of terrorism!

 

[Kileak]

16k? AT&T = Apple Telecommunications & Technologies?

 

[eddieroolz]

Disgusting. This also highlights the issues with customer representatives - so many of them tell you their own variants of info that it becomes impossible to know for sure what is true.

 

[eodeo]

l2skype

 

[bv90andy]

This shows just how bright some solders are... if he cannot be trusted with a mobile phone, how come he has a right to have a gun? And even more importantly, Is this the type of person you want to protect your country?

 

[bv90andy]

oh and $16.000 / $5per minute=3200 minutes in a month divide that by 30 and it's over 100 minutes every day... wow... how come he didn't ask other friends of his why they don;t get such a plan to talk to their families?

 

[Guest]

Sadly, when the customer representative said "4.95/minute" it must have cut out and sounded like "4.95/month... miscommunication due to their own crappy network, lol

 

[lorddude]

Did read all the comments so I apologize if this was pointed out before. But the bill wasn't generated by ATT, what happens is when you're over seas like that, you're using another companies tower, that companie determines the rates at which you're billed then sends the charges to ATT. What happens then is ATT pays said cell phone company the $16,000 then asks you to pay them back for the bill they covered.

There's no "business opportunity" here as the last paragraph suggested, all that happened here was this guy bitched to the media about being treated unfairly and tried to gain sympathy and had his cell phone company pay a bill the he himself racked up. Yeah, ATT is the bad guy here.

 

[braneman]

AT&T bankrupting our soldiers oversees, go get em boys!

 

[brendano257]

[citation][nom]ct1615[/nom]the cell phone carriers are a joke and milk these plans worse then banks with their hidden fees. the only reason at&t dropped the bill was because of the bad press it would bring. text messages use less bandwidth then a voice telephone call yet these bastards charge outrageous prices on them. they even charge you if you use free wi-fi on your cell....[/citation]

I think there was an article in THG that said text messages were sent over an emergency bandwidth that companies were required to have open at all times, so they put texts through it...in other words it doesn't actually cost them money (that they wouldn't have to spend anyway) so they're just over milking it to the extreme.

 

[chuenl]

The AT&T representative must have said "four ninety five" per month. That is 4 hundred and ninety five dollars, not $4.95 per month.