Frenchwoman rings up trillion euro phone bill
AFP - [email protected]
Published: 10 Oct, 2012 CET.
Updated: Wed 10 Oct 2012 15:08 CET
A Frenchwoman who received a telephone bill for an amount equivalent to nearly 6,000 times the country's annual economic output has had the real amount she owed waived – after finally convincing the company they must have made a mistake.
Solenne San Jose, from Pessac in the Bordeaux region of southwestern France, could not believe her eyes when she opened the bill to discover she was being asked to pay €11,721,000,000,000,000 to close her account.
"There were so many zeroes I couldn't even work out how much it was," she said.
San Jose's alarm mounted when operators at Bouygues Telecom told her they could not amend the computer-generated statement or stop the balance from being debited from her bank account.
Only after a series of frantic calls did the company finally admit the bill should have been for €117.21.
Bouygues Telecom told AFP the mix-up had been due to a printing error and a subsequent misunderstanding between the client and staff at their call centre.
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Solenne San Jose, from Pessac in the Bordeaux region of southwestern France, could not believe her eyes when she opened the bill to discover she was being asked to pay €11,721,000,000,000,000 to close her account.
"There were so many zeroes I couldn't even work out how much it was," she said.
San Jose's alarm mounted when operators at Bouygues Telecom told her they could not amend the computer-generated statement or stop the balance from being debited from her bank account.
Only after a series of frantic calls did the company finally admit the bill should have been for €117.21.
Bouygues Telecom told AFP the mix-up had been due to a printing error and a subsequent misunderstanding between the client and staff at their call centre.
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