Roaming charges whilst data roaming turned off

[bcracknell]

I was on holiday in the US last month and had data roaming turned off before I even left the UK. At no point did I turn my data roaming on. Three texted me randomly at 3 points during my trip saying hello and welcome to the USA, outlining the costs associated with using my phone whilst in the USA. These texts were not telling me I was using my data, just letting me know I could. I've just received my bill to find I've been charged 3x £5 plus VAT for roaming services whilst in the USA. I can see on my bill that these supposed usages were really tiny amounts of data, <10MB. When I tried to dispute these charges, stating that I had my date roaming turned off the entire time,  I was told there was no way the system could be incorrect. However, clearly, the system is wrong if I can be charged tiny amounts of data usage whilst my data roaming is turned off. Please can you advise what I can do in this situation? 

[Rjam92]

I have had the same thing happened to me, I just came back from Italy with the data roaming charged over three days, I had it turned off the whole time. I spoke over online chat and have been given credit on my account to cover the cost, they seemed to still imply it was good will and I had used my data (which I hadn't). Apparently if you log on to your account and set your daily roaming cap to £0 it should stop it happening in future, clearly something is not right with their system. 

[atommyk]

Surely that's not a solution if eg you might require an urgent phone call that is then blocked because you've set your roaming limit to 0, just so that you don't get charged for random 1kB packages once per day? 

[jellybean]

I had the same issue. I was in the USA for 11 days in Sept and had roaming turned off, but got hit for roaming charges on 3 days without changing any of my settings. I have an iPhone 14 pro, and at least one of the days was prior to me upgrading to iOS 17. The data usage showed as 0.9KB on two of the days, and 1.9KB and 3.9KB on the third. 

[atommyk]

Interesting. Keep us posted on what that support ticket yields, I've been on iOS17 since it's been launched. 

[Gurj]

I have confirmed with my daughter that she didn't upgrade to iOS17 until the 19th Sept and then she also started getting the text messages about roaming charges after that date, while we were still in Florida.
This suggests the issue might be more to do with iOS17 bugs. I have raised an Apple support ticket and not sure if it will ever get looked at (my last one wasn't) but it's done.

[atommyk]

That is indeed bizarre. I think Three's system itself doesn't really know what it's doing - my latest interrogation of the data usage shows some of these GPRS snippets as included and some not. 

[Gurj]

One other additional interesting fact is that my daughters iPhone 14 Pro didn't show this issue although my wife and son's did like my phone. We all have Three SIMs on the same monthly contract and all turned off data roaming in the USA.

[TheSolent]

Same here in France and Greece this year on iPhone 15 with eSIM. Did any of yours have eSIMs?

[slbarron23]

I was using an Airolo Esim - spent 28 days in New Zealand and three managed to think I’d used data just on 2 random days (for minuscule amounts). 

[Gurj]

The support case was immediately closed with text:
"closing case as there were no billing error found please manage customer expectations as per the notes mentioned in the interaction."

This actually feels quite rude and there was no opportunity for me to challenge, re-open or respond other than getting back in touch with Three Support. I'll do that again when I have enough time to go through the process.