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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Basically what you're saying is that Telstra should come up with a product to support people who steal the SIM cards out of utility smart meters.

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And what you are saying is that there is no possibility that such a feature network-wide (Email to main account holder: "Your phone bill has risen above $1,000 this month. Please make sure that this is not accidental.") would be useful to anyone else, ever.

Which is funny, because it's more or less standard in the UK, and most of the EU.

What phone? The devices being billed aren't phones. There are no "phone bills" involved here.

As far as the phone company is concerned, I'm sure that they can break the charges down by SIM. They'd never have discovered which person was the culprit if they couldn't do that, after all.

That is exactly what they did do in this case. Read the preceding comment carefully and you'll see that you've inadvertently shifted the goal posts; that comment suggests Telstra should be sending a warning to the person who stole the SIM card.

It took four months to discover this. That tells me that the power company demanded an audit, rather than Telstra informing them of anything. This inference is also consistent with the other case I linked to previously in which someone got a huge bill from them.

Had Telstra informed the power company (not the thief!) it undoubtedly would have been caught earlier, when a much smaller sum had been stolen. Moreover, given that black hats can clone SIMs and such, one might think that consumers should be able to demand reasonable protection from thievery from their telecom provider.

Please note that although it's possible that they have a rather long billing period (e.g. they only got bills every few months), such notices would only be useful if they could occur within a billing period, so it still would have helped protect the power company from theft of services.

I have no idea how you managed to carefully read any of the comments and still confused the account holder (the power company) with the woman who misused the SIM card, whether you were reading my comments or those of nagrom.

I cannot help but think that you are willfully misinterpreting my comment.

Substitute 'account' for 'phone' if you like. They can obviously break it down by SIM because otherwise they couldn't figure that this woman 'caused' these charges, right?

This reminds me of a little adventure when I travelled to Malaysia for a sales call. It was terrible but funny (it involved a business partner dropping my USB HSDPA modem into his glass of water). A subplot of it was I let him use my modem while roaming. In the same afternoon, while I was having tea (I mean a meeting/discussion), I got a call from my carrier, on my main cell phone number, who asked if I was the one who used the service in the morning. I said yes and I asked how much it was. The answer was in the range of US$400.

I suppose they would have offered to suspend the line immediately if I had said no.

This sort of thing also happens to people who do not steal SIM cards. It is all too common, sadly:

http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=news/bizarre&i...

$22,000 bill because son's data use wasn't covered in family cell phone plan.

http://www.switched.com/2007/12/14/man-gets-slapped-with-85-...

$85,000 phone bill. "It turns out that he was being charged on a per-kilobyte basis because his unlimited browsing plan didn't cover using the phone as a modem. As a "goodwill" gesture, Bell Mobility has dropped the bill to measly $3,243."

Finally, here's one from Telstra:

http://www.blackberryforums.com.au/forums/general-bis-discus...

"I have recently signed my BB 8800 up on a Telstra $39.95/mth plan which I understood was for unlimited email and internet browsing. I got the shock of my life when I checked my data usage online and saw a bill for $250+ after only a couple of days. On examining further I note that I have not been charged for blackberry.net connections but heavily charged for wap.telstra."

I do not accept the notion that these are remotely comparable situations.

I agree with you that b2c MNO fee structures are predatory.

I do not agree that the fee structure arranged between two giant corporations can be described as "predatory" when it happens to bite the ass of someone who breaks into their network and uses it to steal connectivity.

> I do not accept the notion that these are remotely comparable situations.

So you don't think that the power company got screwed here? We both know that it's unlikely that some random woman is going to be able to pay back a sum like that.

Would it really be so reasonable to expect the phone company to do something to at least warn people, whether businesses or private citizens, who are suddenly racking up over a hundred thousand dollars in charges from one phone so that they can do something about the bill?

"Warning! Our billing systems have detected that you may have inadvertently removed the SIM card from your power meter and plugged it into your mobile device. Please be aware that Enhanced Roaming Charges may apply to further usage."

"Warning! Our billing system has detected that your phone bill will be over $10,000, which is two orders of magnitude higher than any previous billing data."

As I already pointed out, this has affected more people than just those who steal SIM cards. And they should have known that an absurd level of charges were being racked up by a single SIM, so it's not like the phone company couldn't tell that it was abnormal.

The article did say at the end that they've put in measures to stop it happening again. Presumably something along the lines of monitoring usage per SIM. I would guess that it just didn't occur to the power company or Telstra that someone might steal the SIM and put it in their phone.

If I stole a SIM card and used it to download movies, I would fully expect to be liable for the cost of the data at whatever rate the SIM owner had agreed with the telco.

In this case the thief (or really the recipient of the stolen SIM) was unlucky that the data plan was a B2B contract designed for small quantities of data.

In Australia, all the mobile phone and data plans have massive penalties for exceeding your quota by even small amounts. My provider (and I suspect, all the others) deliberately obfiscates both the billing details and the plan rules to make it practically impossible to see how close to your limit your are.

To avoid crippling surprises, people to upgrade to plans they really don't need.

In the banking industry, banks are not allowed to profit from penalty fees (just recoup their losses). I think a similar approach in telecoms would be a good thing.

I say is telecom should not be allow to gouge consumers. They should not charge consumer an amount that is clearly not agreed upon.

If you have misconfigured an app on your phone and it run up $10,000 network charge in month. Will you hand over your $10,000 to the phone company? Do you think this is a fair charge?

Cap the telco off how much they can charge unless authorized. I think this is most fair for both party. Telco can cut off access, but no to gouge consumer.

The person who rips the SIM card out of their smart meter and uses to download stuff off the Internet isn't a consumer.

tptacek, in the scenario that I've construct, if you misconfigured an app that result in an astronomical bill, we you pay it without contest? Will you do it if you have to sell your house to pay off the phone company?

Indeed. They're talking about informing the power company that someone is misusing one of their SIMs.

You know, so that they can discover the theft a bit faster than they did in this case, where it took them from November 19, 2009 until February 9, 2010. A lot less would have been stolen from the power company were that the case.

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