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You hear horror stories of people unwittingly incurring monstrous mobile bills when roaming abroad. Just recently, one Reddit user was horrified to find that AT&T had clobbered them with a $53k charge, after an eight-day European trip they expected to run them about $100 in roaming fees. You tend to feel sorry for these people, while also having lingering thoughts that they’ve been dealt a very tough life lesson. Thankfully, my own roaming-fee surprise involved considerably fewer zeroes. I only incurred about $20 in roaming charges, so not a big hit, but what bothered me was that I’d done everything right to avoid using mobile data. At least, I thought I had.

You might be thinking I’m just as culpable, and maybe lucky I wasn’t charged more. I can assure you that wasn’t the case. I hadn’t forgotten to switch something over after landing, and this wasn’t a travel eSIM taking a few seconds to wake up. In fact, I wasn’t trying to use data at all. I live outside the country of my home network, and that SIM sits in a separate phone on my desk.  Mobile data and roaming are switched off in the device settings, plus the phone is always connected to my Wi-Fi network. I rarely even touch the device and don’t use it to contact anyone, to the point that it’s more of a paperweight than a phone. Despite all that, I was hit with phantom roaming charges twice in three months.