Mythbuster Adam Savage Tweets His Way Out of $11,000 Bill
KI MAE HEUSSNER, ABC News: What would you do if you opened up your cell phone bill to face a dizzying five-digit charge? You might do well to follow Mythbuster Adam Savage’s lead.
When the host of the Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters” learned he had rung up $11,000 in charges from AT&T while in Canada, he headed straight for Twitter. The culprit, he tweeted, was the USB modem plugged into his laptop that was running on a wireless plan suitable for the U.S., but not for Canada.
“AT&T is attempting to charge me 11k for a few hours of web surfing in Canada. Pls RT!,” he posted to his Twitter feed Friday. Later, he wrote, “Almost forgot: Hey AT&T! I will fight this bull****.”
Still later, he added, “They’re claiming I uploaded/downloaded 9 million kilobytes (9 gigs) while in Canada. Frakking impossible.”
Before too long, thanks to many of his 50,000 followers, ‘AT&T’ became a top Twitter trending topic, according to the tech blog TechCrunch.
By later Friday afternoon, the tweeting became too intense for even AT&T to ignore. “Today the tweeps became twoops. Just got off the phone with AT&T and they’ve taken care of everything to my great satisfaction.#twitterrules,” Savage wrote.
But though Savage’s story may be an extreme, he’s not the first nor will he likely be the last to suffer a cellular bill snafu.
