A British family was nearly plunged into financial turmoil after their daughter incurred a staggering £42,000 mobile phone bill, simply by watching TikTok videos while on vacation.
The Alty family was enjoying their holiday in Marrakech when they received the first of two shockingly high bills from O2, leaving them questioning whether they had fallen victim to a cyber attack.
Andrew Alty, who runs a curtain business, was taken aback by the hefty sum. The unexpected expense threatened the financial stability of his Manchester-based company, which employs five people.
It was only when Andrew learned that his daughter had spent a cumulative total of eight hours scrolling through the popular video-sharing app that the situation became clear.
Prior to their trip, Andrew had secured a mobile contract through his small business. However, a critical oversight on his part was failing to notice a clause in the contract—purchased through the retailer Currys and provided by O2—which allowed for uncapped data roaming charges outside of Europe.
Crucially, he didn’t notice that the deal – which he purchased via electrical retailer Currys but was provided by O2 – contained a clause that meant data roaming outside Europe was uncapped.
When he received the bill amounting to £42,000, he realised he had been charged more than £5,000 for every hour his daughter spent enjoying the social media platform.
‘There’s no way they should be able to charge that,’ Mr Alty told The Telegraph, adding: ‘They made no effort to inform us, and just allowed the charges to accrue. I don’t understand how they expect any small business to pay that sort of bill.’
A daughter nearly bankrupted a British family after she racked up a £42,000 mobile phone bill for watching TikTok videos on holiday
When Mr Alty received the first bill, charging him £22,000, he thought it must have been O2’s mistake.
‘I was on my way to the desert. I made multiple attempts to call O2, but there wasn’t much I could do. I could only assume there had been a glitch, or the account had been hacked,’ he said.
It wasn’t until the family had arrived back in the UK that they understood the reason behind the bill, and received another worth £20,000.
Mr Alty added: ‘It’s taken up such a huge part of my life over the past two months. It’s ridiculous. [The customer service teams] have not been helpful, the calls have just ended in frustration and despair.’
Data roaming charges can mount up when phones connect to a mobile network – to enable internet access – outside the UK.
Following Brexit, British citizens lost the right to free roaming within the EU, but several network providers continued to offer customers free or low-cost roaming within Europe.
It’s on holidays outside the EU when customers have to be careful because these charges can spiral – unless a data cap is put in place.
While most major networks, including O2, offer customers these important data caps, Mr Alty’s business contract contained a clause opting out of any caps.
Currys and O2 have since agreed to waive the charges.
According to Ofcom’s complaints figures from July to September in 2025, O2 received the most complaints per 100,000 customers, along with Sky Mobile and Three.
Almost a third of these were related to the networks’ complaints handling.
After spending hours on the phone to customer service, Mr Alty eventually contacted the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), complaining that the ‘opt-out of rest-of-world data cap’ included in his deal was not explained to him by O2.
In response, the FOS ruled that while O2 provided the mobile service, it was ultimately Currys’ responsibility for ‘contract explanations and decisions about spend caps’, meaning the FOS was unable to help with Mr Alty’s complaint about O2.
The FOS deals with disputes about mobile phone insurance, but not the providers themselves.
Meanwhile, mobile phone provider disputes can be resolved via the Communication Ombudsman or the Communication & Internet Services Adjudication Scheme.
A spokesman for O2 said: ‘We’re aware of Mr Alty’s complaint, which the ombudsman ruled was a sales process dispute with his account provider Currys. We understand that this is now resolved, with Currys agreeing to waive all charges.’
Currys told Mr Alty it had conducted an internal review and said the charges were waived ‘given the scale and circumstances surrounding the case’.
