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The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 12:28 am
by Gob
A police force paid a £45,000 bill run up by a burglar after it gave him a mobile phone to help him get back on the straight and narrow.
The phone was handed to the offender from Anglesey in north Wales while he was on bail as part of a scheme to reintegrate criminals into the community.
But he was given a contract sim rather than a pay-as-you-go and North Wales police was left with the huge bill.
Police launched a criminal investigation after receiving the bill and finding that three people may have used the phone. Two were arrested and interviewed but no charges were brought. The force did not say what the phone had been used for.
North Wales police said no disciplinary action had been taken against any member of staff and it had reviewed and tightened up its mobile phone policy.
Details released under a freedom of information request showed that the Orange mobile sim card was used for a number of months in 2014 and the bills, which totalled £44,500, were paid monthly.
The burglar was not given a smart phone but removed the sim card from the simple device and put it into one that he then used to stream video and music.
A police spokesperson said: “Establishing what websites were actually visited or data downloaded is no longer possible.”
In its FoI response, the force said it occasionally used “inexpensive pay-as-you-go mobile phones to maintain contact with vulnerable victims of crime and offenders to integrate them back into the community”.
The force said a phone allowed officials to encourage the individual to stay on track. North Wales police said it had not paid any other criminals’ phone bills. It said he was from the town of Llangefni but would not give further details about the offender.
Re: The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 1:17 pm
by oldr_n_wsr
Seems a trac-phone is the way for this deparment to go.
That's what I have.
Even got a text last night.
And I replied.
The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 3:49 pm
by RayThom
It would have been cheaper to give the ne'er–do–well a mobile home and book one way passage on the ferry to Ireland.
Re: The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 9:07 pm
by Econoline
I would have no idea even how to run up a $45,000 phone bill—let alone a £45,000 bill!
Re: The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 10:56 pm
by Lord Jim
They should have signed him up with Metro PCS...
$30 a month for unlimited data, talk and text...
They must have had one seriously awful plan for this clown to be able to run up a $55,250 bill...(45,000 pounds at the current exchange rate)
Re: The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 7:22 am
by Bicycle Bill
As a customer service rep for a major cellular carrier, I'm here to tell that 1) it's as easy as falling off a log and 2) I've seen even worse. Start with a minimal data plan — one gigabyte per month, let's say — but allow data usage to continue after that with an overage rate of $15-$20 per gigabyte. Steaming music on a 4G network uses something like 1GB per eight hours. Streaming video is even worse; a two hour movie, streamed in hi-def, uses roughly 4 GB (2 GB per hour). And since the parolee wasn't paying the bill, why would he try to restrain himself?
So let's say he was using 10 GB per day — which isn't all that hard to do, as you can see from my figures. That works out to 300 GB in a 30-day month, and if he was one a 1GB plan that's 299 GB of overage. 299 x $20/GB = an overage charge of $5,980, and if this went on for 10 months
(the article says that this was used "for a number of months") that works out to $59,800 (or roughly £47,900).
And if he was "roaming" — the phone was set for use in England but he was in Wales, for example — the per-gigabyte overage charges are even worse. Even here in the USA, if you have Verizon service but use data while roaming in the UK without a UK-specific plan the per-gigabyte charge is in excess of $2000 per GB!!
The problem is that the person who was in charge of vetting the bill and cutting the checks wasn't following up on the charges. However, since they probably have a large number of these "rehab phones" out there, and it probably came in on one single bill from the cell provider, they likely had no way to check each and every individual phone and its usage. Yet another example of government bureaucracy at its finest!
-"BB"-
Re: The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 3:15 pm
by oldr_n_wsr
Make the cell phone only a phone, maybe with texting but that's it.
That's all I use my phone for.
Re: The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 6:07 pm
by Bicycle Bill
oldr_n_wsr wrote:Make the cell phone only a phone, maybe with texting but that's it.
That's all I use my phone for.
That's supposedly what they did.
The burglar was not given a smart phone but
removed the sim card from the simple device and put it into one that he then used to stream video and music. 
(probably one he had stolen in the first place)
Which means the account and the plan the SIM card connected to probably had NO data access at all and
EVERY SINGLE BYTE of data used was billed at the premium rates I mentioned earlier.
-"BB"-
Re: The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 7:50 pm
by dales
SIMM happens.
Re: The UK is insane; Part XXVII
Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 8:05 pm
by Big RR
I ownder If he's still out on parole.