Family is sent a Telstra internet bill for nearly half a MILLION dollars – and the telecommunications giant insisted it wasn’t a mistake for an entire MONTH
- Mother-of-three Karen was left in disbelief when she received a $465,595.23 bill
- She spent almost one month trying to convince Telstra the bill was a mistake
- A Telstra official confirmed the enormous cost was caused by a system glitch
A family was slapped with a Telstra internet bill for nearly half-a-million dollars after a shocking network glitch.
Panicked mother-of-three Karen, from Perth, was left in disbelief when she received the $465,595.23 bill in the mail.
She spent almost a month trying to convince the telco giant the sum was a mistake, but every representative insisted she had to cough up the full amount.
But Karen found out the cause of the six-figure sum was just a ‘system glitch error’ after a difficult battle with the company.
Panicked mother-of-three Karen (pictured) from Perth was left in disbelief when she received the $465,595.23 bill in mail
‘They’ve taken it as it’s still my bill and I’m guilty of that bill until they prove otherwise,’ Karen told A Current Affair.
‘That’s when the stress and anxiety began to build up.’
Karen said her average Telstra bill each month is about $400.
So when she received the enormous sum, she was convinced she may have been hacked.
‘Has it [the modem] been hacked? How has it actually managed to do that much data download without bursting into flames?’, she asked.
Technology expert Trevor Long said the family would have needed to spend 4.5million hours on Facebook or watch 30,000 movies in a month in order to be charged the bill.
‘I don’t think the average home router or home network could cope with it,’ he said.
She spent almost one month trying to convince the telco giant the sum was a mistake but every representative insisted she had to cough up the hefty cost
Karen was convinced she had made progress in her case when she contacted sales representative Robbie from her local Telstra in Bunbury.
He agreed the bill was a mistake and said the cause was due to a misalignment in the system.
Thinking her problem had been solved, Karen received a second bill of $466,000.
Telstra official Michael Ackland finally realised the bill was an error and apologised profusely when A Current Affair contacted him.
‘There were two issues – there was a system glitch error that created the original problem, and then human error to not pick it up as quick as we possibly could,’ he said.
Karen was urged to ignore the bill and was reassured Telstra would fix the billing error.
Telstra official Michael Ackland was convinced the bill was an error and apologised profusely after the program got involved