A Manchester business owner was left facing a £42,000 mobile phone bill after his daughter spent hours watching TikTok on holiday in Morocco, exposing the risks of uncapped data roaming outside Europe.

Andrew Alty, who runs a small curtains business, said he was stunned when he received two bills totalling more than £42,000 while on a family trip to Marrakech. The charges, linked to a business mobile contract provided by O2 and purchased through Currys, threatened to push his five-person firm into financial difficulty.

Initially believing the first £22,000 bill was a system error or evidence of fraud, Mr Alty attempted to contact O2 while still abroad. A second bill of £20,000 followed shortly after the family returned to the UK.

It later emerged that his daughter had spent around eight hours scrolling on TikTok during the holiday. Under the terms of the business contract, data roaming outside Europe was uncapped, a clause Mr Alty said he had not realised applied.

The charges equated to more than £5,000 per hour of usage.

“There’s no way they should be able to charge that,” Mr Alty told The Telegraph. “They made no effort to inform us and just allowed the charges to build.”

Data roaming charges can rise sharply when mobile devices connect to networks outside the UK. Although many providers continue to offer capped or free roaming within Europe, usage in countries beyond the EU can trigger substantial fees unless customers opt into protective caps.

Ofcom data covering July to September 2025 show that O2 was among the most complained-about mobile providers per 100,000 customers, alongside Sky Mobile and Three, with many complaints relating to customer service.

After lodging a complaint with the Financial Ombudsman Service, Mr Alty was informed that responsibility for explaining the contract terms rested with Currys rather than O2. The ombudsman ruled it could not intervene in the dispute over the provider itself.

Following internal reviews, Currys and O2 agreed to waive the full £42,000 charge.

An O2 spokesperson said the complaint had been ruled a sales process matter involving Currys and confirmed the issue had been resolved. Currys said the charges were waived “given the scale and circumstances”.

The case highlights the importance for both consumers and small businesses of reviewing roaming terms carefully before travelling outside Europe, particularly where contracts may opt out of automatic spending caps.