Olympic Gymnast Racks Up $5,000 Bill Playing Pokemon Go In Rio

Ask anyone who has ever used their personal cellular connection on roaming abroad and they are definitely going to say that if you’re not too careful you can easily rack up thousands of dollars in charges and that’s precisely what happened to an Olympic gymnast who just couldn’t stop playing Pokemon Go. It’s likely that the $5,000 cellular bill the gymnast received was enough to put down the game for a long time.

Kohei Uchimura is a gymnast with the Japanese Olympic team and he had the mother of all bill shocks. As millions of people around the globe, he became addicted to Pokemon Go and couldn’t stop playing it even as he touched down in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the games. He wasn’t aware that his cellular connection did not include a flat rate for overseas usage. You can probably guess what happened next.

His teammate Kenzo Shirai told Kyodo News that after Uchimura saw his cellphone bill – which came out to ¥500,000 or $5,000 – he “looked dead at the team meal that day.” Don’t worry, this story has a happy ending.

Carriers usually get a bad rap for trying to milk every penny out of their customers and while that’s true in some cases, Uchimura’s carrier helped him out in a big way. He explained his situation to them and they decided to cut down his bill to ¥3,000 which comes out to just short of $30.

I’m pretty sure he’ll be very careful with cellular data usage aboard from now on.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Pokémon GO