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posted by janrinok on Friday August 05 2016, @08:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the gold-medal-for-sale dept.

Olympic gymnast Kohei Uchimura racked up a £3,700 ($4,850) mobile phone bill playing Pokemon GO in Rio.

The 27-year-old Japanese, who won all-around gold at London 2012, incurred data roaming charges playing the augmented reality game after arriving in Brazil for this month's Games. After receiving the bill, Uchimura "looked dead at the team meal that day", team-mate Kenzo Shirai said.

However, his phone company has agreed to let him pay a daily flat rate.

It means Uchimura, who is favourite to retain his title, will be charged 3000 yen (£22) per day for mobile use abroad instead of the 500,000 yen (£3,700) he thought he would have to pay.

"I really lucked out," the six-time all-around world champion told Japan's Kyodo news agency.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @09:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @09:39PM (#384636)

    > Helps a lot to be a celebrity.

    Maybe, but there are cases of non-celebrities where phone companies have made offers like that.
    These kind of phone bills tend to be legally questionable (in places where consumer protection laws have teeth) and really bad PR, and often so much above the actual cost to the phone company that insisting on it being paid does not necessarily make sense for them.