Trillion-Euro Phone Bill Was A Mistake, Company Admits

After a few panicked phone calls a French woman was finally able to convince Bouygues Telecom that her trillion-euro phone bill was a mistake.

Solenne San Jose, from the Bordeaux region of France, said that she recently received a trillion-euro phone bill. According to Australian News, that’s nearly 6,000 times the country’s economic output every year.

Still, Bouygues Telecom initially said that the bill was accurate. The company told San Jose that there was nothing they could do to amend the computer-generated statement and that the bill, all 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros, would be debited from her bank account.

San Jose said:

“There were so many zeroes I couldn’t even work out how much it was.”

San Jose was eventually able to get the company to admit that it had made a mistake.

According to the AFP, Bouygues Telecom said that the woman should have been billed for 117.21 euros. The company just put the decimal in the wrong place … and added a dozen zeros.

Bouygues Telecom said that the mistake was the result of a printing error. The confusion was then multiplied through a misunderstanding between the client and the call center.

This, of course, isn’t the first time that a printing error has resulted in a ridiculously large phone bill. Of course, sometime’s huge phone bills aren’t the company’s fault. Last year a man ran up a $200,000 phone bill due to roaming data charges.

What would you do if you received a trillion-euro phone bill?