SALLY SORTS IT: My 12-year-old ran up a £9,000 mobile bill on our holiday in Egypt

We went on holiday to Egypt in December, taking three mobile phones with us. On the first day my partner rang our provider EE to ask about getting internet for our children while we were away.

The prices were so ridiculous that he decided to forget about purchasing data and instead bought some texts and call bundles. We thought that was the end of it. But in late January our phones were cut off.

My partner rang EE to be told we had exceeded our credit limit as our bill was more than £9,000. We couldn’t believe it.

EE is unwilling to negotiate other than to reduce the bill to £7,500, which is apparently what the contract is capped at.

We don’t usually go over by one penny, so why weren’t we informed about what was happening? We have a £10 spending cap on our phones and clearly went well over this, but no one did anything.

L. M., Carlisle.

Roaming rip-off: A reader returned home from a family holiday in Egypt to receive a shock £9,000 mobile phone bill

Sally Hamilton replies: Returning from Egypt to a pyramid-sized phone bill, which far exceeded the cost of your holiday, must have been galling.

It emerged that the charges had piled up because your 12-year-old daughter had been using social media and playing computer games on her phone, which can be seriously costly for travellers to Egypt.

She managed to do this, even though your partner had decided against purchasing data packages for the phones. It appears she had responded directly to EE texts received when the plane landed.

Had your partner known about this exchange he would have instantly confiscated the phone. Unfortunately, you and he were oblivious and remained so until your phones were suddenly cut off back in the UK.

This was especially alarming as it happened when your partner was in hospital, leaving you unable to contact him by phone. Eventually, contact was made, and he rang EE to discover the huge roaming bill was to blame for the service blackout.

He offered to pay EE for the data used between your youngster activating the service until the phone call he made to say he didn’t want data — but this was rejected.

Although I was surprised you hadn’t noticed that your daughter had been so busy on her phone, I felt empathy for your plight and asked EE if it would reduce your bill further.

After some consideration, it came back with an offer to cut the cost to £4,500 — half the original bill.

You still felt hard done by, so took your case to the Ombudsman. But, it thought EE’s 50 per cent offer fair and suggested you accept it. This you have done so you can protect your credit rating and put the whole sorry experience behind you.

Even though I feel you were at fault for not monitoring your daughter’s phone usage more closely, I expected more compassion from EE. 

Customers should be protected from such bonkers charges. Who would actively choose to spend a Pharaoh’s ransom on playing games on their phone?

Frustratingly for you, while some mobile firms, including EE, apply a £45 spend cap on data used abroad to protect customers, this does not apply in all countries, nor to situations where customers opt into add-ons, such as data passes.

In Egypt, data can be used only if EE customers buy the expensive add-ons. So there is no £45 cap.

Catherine Hiley, mobile expert at comparison website Uswitch, says: ‘Since Brexit, the £45 worldwide roaming cap is no longer in UK law, so there are very few roaming protections available for customers.

‘While some networks, such as Sky Mobile, giffgaff, O2 and Three, have kept this worldwide cap, others, such as Tesco Mobile, have scrapped this protection.’ 

In short, this means destinations such as Egypt, which sits outside most UK networks’ standard roaming policies, can pose a greater overspending risk for holidaymakers.

When your daughter fatefully clicked on the EE links, your bills started clocking up as much as £57.10 per 110MB of data she consumed. Uswitch figures show that streaming a one-hour show on Netflix, or similar, uses 644 MB.

If your daughter had binged a seven-episode series, for example, that would have racked up a bill of £2,340, or if she had streamed a two-hour movie in high definition, 4.2GB of data would have been consumed, costing about £2,394. 

Gaming for an hour might have notched up £30. It is easy to see how the bill spiralled to a dizzying £9,000-plus.

You have learned a sobering lesson from your mobile bill misery — one that you are keen to share as a warning to others.

Holidaymakers wanting to avoid such ‘stress on the Nile’, should consider switching off roaming and using phones only when there is free Wi-Fi access, such as in a hotel.

Ensure children understand the implications — and if they don’t, take away their phones for the duration. For reassurance, consider periodically checking your mobile accounts while away. 

Alternatively, buy a local Sim card at the destination, which might cost as little as £10 to £20 and provide adequate data.

You simply replace your mobile’s usual Sim card with the temporary local one. A device needs to be ‘unlocked’ to accept the Sim, so check with your provider before jetting off.

Where has my £985 tax refund gone? 

Last August I was awarded a tax refund of £985 by HM Revenue & Customs [HMRC], but it was paid into a bank account that had been closed some time ago. 

In the past, any tax refunds have been paid by cheque, so I was unaware it was going directly into a bank account.

My husband’s refund bounced straight back, but mine is still missing six months later, despite having spent hours on the phone to the Revenue and the bank.

J. M., Worcestershire.

Sally Hamilton replies: Your accountant ticked you off, you said, because you had signed off your tax return without checking the bank account listed on the forms. He had a point.

In your defence, you had always received a cheque in the post for any refund owed, so it didn’t occur to you to question this detail.

However, the oversight has cost you dear, in terms of time lost in phoning and emailing the Revenue and your bank — not to mention any financial returns you might otherwise have received on the money in a savings or investment account in the interim.

I suspect what happened was that your old account number had been recycled. Many banks re-use numbers from accounts that have been closed for several years.

If the payment ended up in this old account, now belonging to another customer, the taxman would have had to issue a ‘recall request’ via its bank and hope that the customer would hand the money back.

Anyone who is on the receiving end of such a windfall should note that refusing to return it could result in them being charged for ‘retaining wrongful credit’.

Whatever the explanation, I thought the Revenue should get its skates on and sort things out. Six months is a long time to be waiting. 

It took another four weeks, but I’m pleased to say HMRC finally recovered the repayment and forwarded it to the correct account.

While it stated that the bank details used initially had appeared on your tax return for each of the past 12 years, it also confirmed you had updated this information in October last year and so apologised for the length of time taken to resolve matters.

You told me you are just happy finally to have your money.

Your case serves as a lesson to us all in taking care over checking bank account details when sending or arranging to receive payments. 

Although banks adhere to a code of practice to attempt to retrieve money sent to the wrong place, they cannot guarantee to get it back.

• Write to Sally Hamilton at Sally Sorts It, Money Mail, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT or email [email protected] — include phone number, address and a note addressed to the offending organisation giving them permission to talk to Sally Hamilton. Please do not send original documents as we cannot take responsibility for them. No legal responsibility can be accepted by the Daily Mail for answers given.