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Comment by raquo | Hacker News Reader

What I hate most in such cases is that the telco will just sit silent until it presents you an insane bill at the end of the month. How hard is it to implement a system that would compare each customer's last day's spending with their own 75-percentile daily spending over last 30 days and alert them of extraordinary activity? That would prevent 70% of such problems. 99% if something similar was implemented for roaming charges.

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While I agree with your sentiment, we aren't talking about an MNO's business-to-consumer billing relationship; we're talking about the vastly-more-complicated relationship the MNO has with an electrical utility.

By way of comparison, if I accidentally spin up 4x as many EC2 large instances as I needed, I don't believe Amazon has a system to send me a message saying "you are doing something dumb, stop it".

My university does this, and sends me an email the second my bandwidth usage is showing 'unusual activity', usually triggered by skype (since it uploads a lot). So, not too hard.

But your university gives you a flat fee for bandwidth, does it not? If so, then their incentive is to help you use less. A telco which offers per-GB rates would rather you use more.

Well, what's their incentive to set something like that up? It would hurt their bottom line to be that good of a citizen.

Exactly, so in this case the consequences to the convicted woman was a double whammy: the huge bill exaggerated the scale of her crime, which meant the uncompassionate legal system punished her with a jail term to match the "damages".

The legal system failed both in its discretionary punishment and in regulating the telco enough to avoid this situation and protect consumers.

Agreed. It appears that she was averaging a $4k+/day bill -- it shouldn't take 4 months to notice that something is wrong with that.

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