Teenager racks up £1.5k phone bill
A teenager racked up a phone bill of £1,158 from voting for her favourite actress in a reality TV series.
''There's no way I'll be able to pay this.''
Nicole Hassall, 18, voted for her idol, Lucy Pargeter - who stars in British soap opera 'Emmerdale' - more than 2,000 times in just six hours when she was in the latest series of 'I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!'.
Her mother Eileen, 62, has now had to pay some of the bill using all of the £250 she had earmarked to spend on Nicole's Christmas presents.
Eileen has hit out at network provider Orange, which sent her warnings about the cost of the bill three days after Nicole made the calls, for not giving her more notice about the eye-watering bill.
She is quoted by The Sentinel newspaper as saying: ''It's absolutely disgusting that Orange didn't let me know what was happening.
''There's no way I'll be able to pay this.''
An Orange spokesman said: ''We sympathise with Ms Hassall and have offered her a substantial reduction on her bill as a gesture of goodwill.
''To help customers avoid high charges from voting lines we terminated each of the calls after six seconds. However, as the customer in this instance continued to call the number for several hours additional charges were incurred.''
Tagged in bizarre