[nagrom]

And what you are saying is that there is no possibility that such a feature network-wide (Email to main account holder: "Your phone bill has risen above $1,000 this month. Please make sure that this is not accidental.") would be useful to anyone else, ever.

Which is funny, because it's more or less standard in the UK, and most of the EU.

[tptacek]

What phone? The devices being billed aren't phones. There are no "phone bills" involved here.

[Natsu]

As far as the phone company is concerned, I'm sure that they can break the charges down by SIM. They'd never have discovered which person was the culprit if they couldn't do that, after all.

[tptacek]

That is exactly what they did do in this case. Read the preceding comment carefully and you'll see that you've inadvertently shifted the goal posts; that comment suggests Telstra should be sending a warning to the person who stole the SIM card.

[Natsu]

It took four months to discover this. That tells me that the power company demanded an audit, rather than Telstra informing them of anything. This inference is also consistent with the other case I linked to previously in which someone got a huge bill from them.

Had Telstra informed the power company (not the thief!) it undoubtedly would have been caught earlier, when a much smaller sum had been stolen. Moreover, given that black hats can clone SIMs and such, one might think that consumers should be able to demand reasonable protection from thievery from their telecom provider.

Please note that although it's possible that they have a rather long billing period (e.g. they only got bills every few months), such notices would only be useful if they could occur within a billing period, so it still would have helped protect the power company from theft of services.

I have no idea how you managed to carefully read any of the comments and still confused the account holder (the power company) with the woman who misused the SIM card, whether you were reading my comments or those of nagrom.

[nagrom]

I cannot help but think that you are willfully misinterpreting my comment.

Substitute 'account' for 'phone' if you like. They can obviously break it down by SIM because otherwise they couldn't figure that this woman 'caused' these charges, right?

[hboon]

This reminds me of a little adventure when I travelled to Malaysia for a sales call. It was terrible but funny (it involved a business partner dropping my USB HSDPA modem into his glass of water). A subplot of it was I let him use my modem while roaming. In the same afternoon, while I was having tea (I mean a meeting/discussion), I got a call from my carrier, on my main cell phone number, who asked if I was the one who used the service in the morning. I said yes and I asked how much it was. The answer was in the range of US$400.

I suppose they would have offered to suspend the line immediately if I had said no.