A former Montrealer who had his cellphone stolen while on vacation overseas got dinged with a bill of over $1500 in fraudulent charges.
Jared Hillel's phone was stolen when he was in Barcelona so he tried to get his parents in Montreal to help and cancel his phone service, using a friend's phone to text them. But that was only seven hours after receiving the text that got lost in cyberspace.
Jared's father Philip Hillel said he was the main authorized user for the cellphone so it wasn't as simple for his son to just call up Videotron to deactivate it.
"A few weeks later, my dad informs me that whoever'd taken my phone made something like 1000 calls within that 7 hours period and they had a $1500 phone bill," said Jared Hillel in an interview with CJAD 800.
They contested the bill but lost, with the cellphone service provider deemed to have operated by the book.
"There's a huge gap in the regulations here because the caps on roaming apply only to data, not to voice services," said tech analyst Carmi Levy.
"This should be a warning sign to our national telecom regulator to maybe look at imposing protections for voice-based services as well as the data-based services."
In the meantime, said Levy:
"Take the time to lock down your settings now so that even if your phone is locked and missing, it will be absolutely useless to anyone but you."
Jared Hillel said there should be safeguards in place to prevent this.
"The credit card company just knows the system shuts stuff down when there's irregular behaviour and in this case, nothing shut down. The (cellphone) company admitted that, Yeah, this wasn't you and still forced us to pay which I don't think is fair at all," said Hillel.