Canadian hit with $10,000 data roaming bill

You may remember that in October we reported on a Florida woman who got a massive $200,000 bill from her wireless provider. The huge bill was generated by her brother, who shared her wireless plan, and then went to Canada and forgot to turn off the smartphone's data roaming features.

Now there's word that a Canadian man got a huge bill of his own when he forgot about the data roaming charges on his own account. CBCNews reports that John Gibson, from Weyburn, Saskatchewan went on a recent trip to Phoenix, Arizona. He brought along his laptop with a data connect stick from the SaskTel wireless provider.

Gibson's son Jason and his grandchildren Jayden and Sawyer watched a few movies on Netflix via the laptop with the mobile data stick while on vacation in the States. When the family came home to Weyburn they got a bad surprise when they received a bill from SaskTel for over $10,000 ($10,668.38 to be exact).

As you might expect, the culprit was the data roaming plan that Gibson signed up for. He didn't take those extra charges into account when his family traveled across the border to the US.

Thankfully, SaskTek had some mercy on Gibson and agreed to reduce the bill he had to pay to around $1,000. However, it's yet another lesson to read about the extra charges you might get from your provider if you choose to take your smartphone, tablet or laptop data stick out of your country of origin.