My delight at the holiday snaps of my 12 year old’s son’s school trip to South Africa and trip with his mates to Turkey turned to horror at 2.30pm yesterday when my phone stopped working.

Calling Vodaphone I was put through to credit who informed me that my son’s phone had rung up a £760 bill for his first trip in July and a whopping £2500 bill for his second trip in August.

 Pay up now or no more service

So I paid upfront.

 Now what is going through my mind is that I pay my son’s bills and I did not get any notification in July or August that the International Call barring had been turned off nor that the bills were racking up at £250 per day.

Apparently if you are in an EC country, roaming is turned-off once you’ve hit a 50 Euro limit (thanks EC). If you are in Turkey or South Africa you just go on racking up the bills and there’s nothing the unsuspecting bill-payer can do about it.

Big shout-out to all parents who pick up phone bills forthier kids. There appears to be very little you can do other than confiscate the pesky device before overseas travel.

Big shout out to OFCOM– this kind of thing is not acceptable what are you going to do about it?

Big shout-out to all the lawyers reading this… do you want to help me to get this stuff stopped and get some proper regulation of overseas roaming?

I’m on my Vodaphone- 07785 377768 (I’ve omitted the +44!)