French Woman Receives Quadrillion Dollar Phone Bill

Solenne San Jose, from Pessac, in the Bordeaux region of France, received an insane bill after she canceled her contract with phone carrier Bouygues Telecom.

The woman expected to pay a cancellation fee of about €100. Instead, the bill was made out for a whopping 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros, the Herald reports. In case you can't stop counting, that is almost 12 quadrillion euros, or 14.92 quadrillion dollars.

The sum is so outrageous, that it was compared to the budget of the entire country, and it comes down to about France's 2011 GDP, multiplied by 6000, the Huffington Post informs.

Even worse, in the computer-generated bill it was stipulated that if she had failed to pay the amount, it would have been automatically withdrawn from her bank account, which would have left the woman with no life savings, and basically penniless.

Mrs. San Jose started making what would be a series of calls to Bouygues Telecom, trying to rectify the error.

“There were so many zeros I couldn't even work out how much it was," she said.

She spoke to Bouygues Telecom operators repeatedly, and even had to explain why the amount was obviously billed to her by mistake. Imagine explaining why you couldn't have made more phone calls than an entire country.

When she finally got through to customer service reps, they billed her for only €117.21. Bourgues Telecom had to acknowledge their mistake, which they attributed to a printing error. Solenne became the recipient of the largest telephone bill known to man though, and could be awarded a record title.

In October 2011, a woman from Fort Lauderdale, Florida received another outlandish bill, this time for $201,005.44 (£126,000). Carrier T-Mobile first attributed the sum to the woman's brother leaving his data roaming service on and downloading videos, during a two-week holiday. Celina Aarons did, however, manage to explain the costs were impossible to explain, and her bill was lowered to $2,500 (£1,600).