Roaming charges

[Chrissy]

Hi,

I went recently to continental Europe for just over two weeks. Before leaving the UK i turned roaming data off on my iPhone however, during my stay abroad I got charged for using data 5 times. Any ideas what could've triggered the data charges? I have an eSIM installed on my iPhone as it's simply cheaper than Three's daily charge, yet still got charged for using data despite turning it off completely. Any ideas welcome

[tonymudd]

Jonathan, could you add me to this investigation please?  I had the same issue a couple of months ago in Croatia.

    Thanks,   Tony.

[Bmanashe]

Hi Jonathan, can you please investigate mine too. I keep getting charged random daily roaming charges whilst in Poland, even though I have a local e-sim installed and no day switching option turned on (the local e-sim is set as default for data and phone). Also seems to happen at around 2am- when asleep, as a lot of people have said! Not happy with keep on getting charged when I’ve gone out of my way to get a local e-sim installed. 

[Bmanashe]

Sorry, that was supposed to say NO DATA SWITCHING TURNED ON

[apadley1337]

I'm in the USA now and have just been charged a daily £5 charge right after I arrived, with roaming off. This is on two iPhones with ios 17 and 16.7.1. I did notice, that once I'd connected, a message popped up on my screen saying 'SIM is sending SMS message'. I presume this is some sort of carrier message that is triggering the charge, so nothing the user is doing and nothing to do with roaming. Very shady practice from 3

[JonathanB]

Hi @apadley1337,

I'm not familiar with any process where we'd be triggering an SMS, have you been able to see the charge on your billing? The other users that have mentioned this recently have said that the charge was assigned to data usage rather than a text on their itemised section of the bill.

Any sign of an outgoing message in your messages, or which App is actually sending the message?

Thanks,
Jonathan

[apadley1337]

The charge appears as a 1kB data charge and happened a minute after both phones got the 'Welcome to the USA' message just after we landed. Roaming was off the whole time on both phones so whatever is being sent by the SIM is an SMS message but it is being billed as a data message.

[Gurj]

Chrissy,

So far it seems at least 3 of us were using an iPhone. Were you on an iPhone 14 Pro too? Were you using iOS 17 (or beta version)?
My daughter's phone didn't get the USA charges and she was still on iOS16 until halfway through our recent holiday, then she started getting the SIM messages about roaming charges.

[Gurj]

Yes, support were useless for me to. Raised case which was then closed saying no problem the next day.

[Gurj]

Seeing same issues. I have just added a comment in this other thread:
https://community.three.co.uk/t5/Network/Roaming-charges-whilst-data-roaming-turned-off/m-p/17979

I've had the charges with and without using an ESIM while roaming with Data Roaming definitely off all the time and using an iPhone 14 Pro Max on latest iOS releases.

[atommyk]

I have the same problem over here. Weirdly I've been to Portugal about a month ago without any of these issues (also with eSIM from a different provider for the data usage). There I don't think I had a problem. Now travelled to Austria, I'm getting almost daily texts at 02:40-02:50 (I'm definitely asleep then) stating my new roaming charge has been applied. Why on earth? I have data roaming off, no data switching. 

three support was not really useful. They have so far only suggested to switch off international roaming entirely but according to them that would cut me off completely when abroad. Not useful.