Daughter almost bankrupts British household by racking up £42,000 information invoice watching TikTok on vacation

A daughter nearly bankrupted a British family after she racked up a £42,000 mobile phone bill for watching TikTok videos on holiday.

The Alty family were enjoying a trip away in Marrakech when O2 sent the first of two enormous bills, leaving them wondering if they had been victims of a hack. 

Andrew Alty, a curtains business owner, was stunned by the price tag, which left his five-person Manchester-based company in danger of going under.

But when he discovered his daughter had scrolled on the popular video-sharing app for a total of eight hours, the pieces started to fall into place.

Before the holiday, he had taken out a contract through his small business.

Crucially, he didn’t notice that the deal – which he purchased via electrical retailer Currys but was provided by O2 – contained a clause that meant data roaming outside Europe was uncapped. 

When he received the bill amounting to £42,000, he realised he had been charged more than £5,000 for every hour his daughter spent enjoying the social media platform.

‘There’s no way they should be able to charge that,’ Mr Alty told The Telegraph, adding: ‘They made no effort to inform us, and just allowed the charges to accrue. I don’t understand how they expect any small business to pay that sort of bill.’

A daughter nearly bankrupted a British family after she racked up a £42,000 mobile phone bill for watching TikTok videos on holiday

When Mr Alty received the first bill, charging him £22,000, he thought it must have been O2’s mistake.

‘I was on my way to the desert. I made multiple attempts to call O2, but there wasn’t much I could do. I could only assume there had been a glitch, or the account had been hacked,’ he said. 

It wasn’t until the family had arrived back in the UK that they understood the reason behind the bill, and received another worth £20,000.

Mr Alty added: ‘It’s taken up such a huge part of my life over the past two months. It’s ridiculous. [The customer service teams] have not been helpful, the calls have just ended in frustration and despair.’

Data roaming charges can mount up when phones connect to a mobile network – to enable internet access – outside the UK.

Following Brexit, British citizens lost the right to free roaming within the EU, but several network providers continued to offer customers free or low-cost roaming within Europe.

It’s on holidays outside the EU when customers have to be careful because these charges can spiral – unless a data cap is put in place. 

While most major networks, including O2, offer customers these important data caps, Mr Alty’s business contract contained a clause opting out of any caps.

Currys and O2 have since agreed to waive the charges.

According to Ofcom’s complaints figures from July to September in 2025, O2 received the most complaints per 100,000 customers, along with Sky Mobile and Three.

Almost a third of these were related to the networks’ complaints handling.

After spending hours on the phone to customer service, Mr Alty eventually contacted the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), complaining that the ‘opt-out of rest-of-world data cap’ included in his deal was not explained to him by O2.

In response, the FOS ruled that while O2 provided the mobile service, it was ultimately Currys’ responsibility for ‘contract explanations and decisions about spend caps’, meaning the FOS was unable to help with Mr Alty’s complaint about O2. 

The FOS deals with disputes about mobile phone insurance, but not the providers themselves.

Meanwhile, mobile phone provider disputes can be resolved via the Communication Ombudsman or the Communication & Internet Services Adjudication Scheme.

A spokesman for O2 said: ‘We’re aware of Mr Alty’s complaint, which the ombudsman ruled was a sales process dispute with his account provider Currys. We understand that this is now resolved, with Currys agreeing to waive all charges.’

Currys told Mr Alty it had conducted an internal review and said the charges were waived ‘given the scale and circumstances surrounding the case’.