…Not literally, mind you, but that emoji pack you bought to liven up your text messages could cost you a lot more than the 99 cents you paid for it. An unfortunate Scottish lass recently learned that lesson the hard way.
She racked up a whopping $1,800 in charges. How did she manage that? Overseas long distance calls? Roaming fess? Nope. Unbeknownst to her, she’d been sending MMS after MMS and while her contract with UK carrier EE covered her for unlimited SMS messages, it didn’t include any multimedia freebies. Each MMS message carried an additional £1 ($1.50) charge.
If you’re sending a family member a holiday photo from your phone, maybe it’s worth the fee. If all you’re sending is a yellow face with a toothy grin, a heart, or a steaming pile, on the other hand… well, it doesn’t really seem worth it. Especially not when you do it 1,500 times in a month, ending in that ridiculous $1,800 bill.
But that’s exactly what EE said this woman had done. Whether she realized it or not, her phone had been converting emoji to picture attachments. You might have seen this happen before on one of your own devices. While most phones and apps can transmit emoji as strings of characters that get “translated” by the phone you send them to, that’s not always the case. Some see them as tiny .JPGs and send them off as tiny .JPGs.
It would be nice if carriers had our best interests in mind and alerted us to obvious impending overages like this, but let’s face it. They’re businesses, and this is one way they generate profit. It’s up to us to make sure we understand our contracts and devices so we don’t get blindsided.
Now read: Scientifically accurate Barney is like something out of Jurassic Park