Kylie Monks, a 33-year-old Tasmanian woman, has been jailed for stealing a SIM card and using the hell out of it. How intense was it? Over a 3-month period, she racked up $193,187.43 worth of data fees. Monks, to her credit, said she only used the SIM card to check Facebook and download a dozen movies.
That’s insane! The Register says she stole the 3G SIM card from an electric meter and plugged it into her laptop to enjoy free internet. The SIM card was obviously only meant to send bits of data about the meter to the power company so you could imagine their shock when the 3-month bill turned out to be $US200,000. Monks was arrested and she’s going to have to serve 6 months in jail for her theft.
I took a look at Telstra’s data rates and if you’re a pay-as-you-go customer—basically their worst rate available—it’s $US2 per megabyte. That would mean she downloaded 100,000 megabytes or around 97 gigabytes of data in a three-month span. That’s a lot of Facebooking, let me tell ya. [The Mercury.au via The Register]
Image Credit: Shutterstock/Sinisa Botas