History Main / ShockinglyExpensiveBill

** Likewise in ''VideoGame/Tekken8'', after Law has won the right to the Mishima Zaibatsu is given a bill for the damages the Mishima Zaibatsu racked up thanks to Jin causing World War III. The resulting bill has so many zeroes that Law straight up [[DeathAsComedy dies from shock.]]

[[folder:Puppet Show]]

** In a related example, [[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2171930/X-Box-Live-Boy-playing-Call-Duty-Fifa-ran-1-150-bill.html this]] a wildly irresponsible child spent over 1000 pounds sterling on his Xbox then blamed Microsoft.

** A [[https://www.the-whiteboard.com/autotwb3282.html later story]] had Doc receive a power bill that made him balk at six-hundred and seventy five ''thousand'' dollars. Which was even more impressive considering they have over a dozen in house nuclear reactors.

A less comical example is a form of [[TheCon extortion racket]] where a crooked business owner presenting the bill--often a sleazy strip club or bar in a WretchedHive-- is a [[LegitimateBusinessmensSocialClub front]] for TheSyndicate. Any "mark" who refuses to pay the inflated bill is free to "discuss" it in the back alley with the owner's [[TheBrute large burly "associates"]].

** In the ''Stormblood'' expansion, Gosetsu's katana ends up in the hands of a Hingan merchant. Alphinaud, as a gift to Yugiri, buys it back for the asking price without even attempting to haggle, sending the bill to the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. While the player never find out exactly how much he paid, we DO see Tataru's reaction to the receipt - immediately upon reading it, she demands Alphinaud meet her at the office for a talk. During their travels, Alisaie points out that a good-quality katana like Gosetsu's is worth enough to buy a house[[note]]which, for the player, '''starts''' at 3 million gil for the smallest home[[/note]] and furnish it. "Which you would know if you bothered to ''check the price''." The next time the player regroups with Alphinaud, he's so afraid of reinvoking Tataru's wrath that he refuses to even buy so much as a cup of tea without counting every penny he has, much to Alisaie's consternation.

* This tends to happen at hotels when guests damage or take non-disposable amenities such as towels or linens. Protip: ''Don't'' use the towels to wipe blood from cuts, as a barf bag, or even just to wipe makeup off your face. In many hotels, the towels in question are declared biohazards that have to be disposed of and you will be charged for replacements. Similarly, be ''very careful'' if you see water bottles, alcoholic beverages, and edible items arranged neatly on a shelf or in a minifridge; as many guests have found out the hard way, using these items will get these items billed to you upon checkout. This is why many hotels require an incidentals/security/damage deposit. A subversion of this can occur should one decide to pay using a credit or debit card, depending on the exact method that the hotel uses for transactions. Suppose the room itself is $200, plus an incidentals hold of $150. You'll see a transaction of $350, but what is actually happening is that the hotel ran an authorization hold of $350, which is less binding than an outright charge (i.e. "hey bank, set this money aside for us, but don't actually move it out of the customer's account yet"). Once the transaction settles, and assuming you don't ring up any incidental charges, the final charge on your bank statement will be $200 as expected. Of course, you have to have $350 in your bank account or credit line in the first place, and the remaining $150 can take time to be available again due to how banks process reversals, so this mechanic can cause headaches for first-time travelers. A common trope amongst hotel workers is a guest checking in, and then resisting providing incidentals because rather than a traditional pay-when-you-check-in reservation, they booked a pre-paid booking and expected to not have to provide another cent upon arrival (usually because they didn't read the fine print on the hotel listing that reads "A valid credit card is required for incidentals").

* This tends to happen at hotels when guests damage or take non-disposable amenities such as towels or linens. Protip: ''Don't'' use the towels to wipe blood from cuts, as a barf bag, or even just to wipe makeup off your face. In many hotels, the towels in question are declared biohazards that have to be disposed of and you will be charged for replacements. Similarly, be ''very careful'' if you see water bottles, alcoholic beverages, and edible items arranged neatly on a shelf or in a minifridge; as many guests have found out the hard way, using these items will get these items billed to you upon checkout. This is why many hotels require an incidentals/security/damage deposit. A subversion of this can occur should one decide to pay using a credit or debit card, depending on the exact method that the hotel uses for transactions. Suppose the room itself is $200, plus an incidentals hold of $150. You'll see a transaction of $350, but what is actually happening is that the hotel ran an authorization hold of $350, which is less binding than an outright charge (i.e. "hey bank, set this money aside for us, but don't actually move it out of the customer's account yet"). Once the transaction settles, and assuming you don't ring up any incidental charges, the final charge on your bank statement will be $200 as expected. Of course, you have to have $350 in your bank account or credit line in the first place, and the remaining $150 can take time to be available again due to how banks process reversals, so this mechanic can cause headaches for first-time travelers.

* The same kind of thing can happen with student loans, which is why you'll hear of people that took out a $25K student loan, never missed a payment or made a late payment, but owe $50K. To make matters worse, student loans in the US ''cannot'' be discharged in bankruptcy, nor refinanced, the way that credit card debt, medical debt, car loans, and even ''mortgages'' can be. The intent of student loans is that you pay them off later when you take up a job with your shiny new degree, but perhaps the job doesn't pay enough to pay off the loan (in addition to your other expenses), or it's simply too difficult to find a well-paying job in your field.

* The same kind of thing can happen with student loans, which is why you'll hear of people that took out a $25K student loan, never missed a payment or made a late payment, but owe $50K. To make matters worse, student loans in the US ''cannot'' be discharged in bankruptcy, nor refinanced, the way that credit card debt, medical debt, car loans, and even ''mortgages'' can be.

* One "Majima Everywhere" event in ''[[VideoGame/Yakuza1 Yakuza Kiwami]]'' has Majima disguise himself as a bartender, then offer Kiryu a variety of liquors. He then demands a ludicrous amount of money for it. This is done with the full expectation that Kiryu will refuse to pay and kick the crap out of him for it. After the fight, Majima is greatly amused that [[ExpensiveGlassOfCrap he managed to pawn off rotgut as top-shelf booze to Kiryu]].

** A woman in France received a rather substantial phone bill of [[http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/oct/11/french-phone-bill 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros;]] (5,000 times the GDP of ''France itself''). The phone company was kind enough to allow payment in multiple installments. It was ''then'' revealed to be in error--she actually owed only 117.21 euros; 0.000 000 000 001% of the original bill.
** One family from Singapore that went on vacation got a rude surprise when they forgot to disable their data plans while overseas and racked up a $3000 bill over the course of a few days. Starhub later tried to prevent future repeats of such incidents by introducing roaming-dedicated data plans specifically tailored to travelers and a data cutoff point when the overcharge rates exceeded a certain amount. In any case, Singaporean telecom companies offer pre-paid SIM card plans for travelers, giving them a good choice of temporary local phone numbers with reasonable billing schemes for data on a daily basis.

* More than a few people traveling to other countries might experience sticker shock if they [[RidiculousExchangeRates forget to take their exchange rates into account]]. For instance, 5 (HK) bucks for a soda isn't so unreasonable a price when you remember that that is about 63 cents US.

* This has become a common occurrence when children are given access to {{Allegedly Free Game}}s. The kids might not realize that the in-game purchases were in real money and the parents might not know that the game would let her make the purchases for 15 minutes after they last used their account password without prompting for the password again. To give an example, when the parents of an 8-year old girl let her play the game Smurfs' Village on their iPhone, she bought $1,400 worth of Smurfberries in the game. The publisher Capcom Games and Apple received many similar complaints about this issue from parents seeing $100+ bills on their accounts.
** In a related example, [[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2171930/X-Box-Live-Boy-playing-Call-Duty-Fifa-ran-1-150-bill.html this]] wildly irresponsible child spent over 1000 pounds sterling on his Xbox then blamed Microsoft.
** Can also happen when children can use their household smart speaker. One little girl bought a dollhouse and a stack of toys by asking Alexa for them. Her parents first planned to return the toys, but turned it into a teachable moment by taking the girl to donate them to a children's hospital.
* A pretty common scam in a lot of countries. Cute girls find a foreigner (as all foreigners are rich!), invite him to a tea ceremony, and the final bill ends up being relatively expensive. The scammers pay as well (although they get their money refunded after the sucker leaves).
** In a similar vein, bottle bars, also known as clip joints. Upon entering a bar, the guest will be joined by several pretty girls who coax him into ordering as many bottles of wine, champagne and whatnot. When it comes time to pay, the bottles turn out to cost well into the triple digits and [[DumbMuscle some large men]] arrive to "protect you" while you get the money from a nearby ATM.

* ''Website/NotAlwaysRight'' has a few instances of this as well. One entry in the LaserGuidedKarma section of the page has a customer who for all intents and purposes should have ''expected'' that to happen, because she'd only bought a few free minutes because she'd trusted her teenage girls with phones and they were "responsible adults." Cue her coming back in a few weeks later to get the charges (which were about 500 dollars each) taken off her bill, throwing a fit when they wouldn't (including smashing the phone ''when she threw it at the worker'') then very nearly tearing the front of her brand-new, expensive car off by hitting a streetlight as she had attempted to angrily drive away.

* Some patrons not accustomed to restaurants where a gratuity is automatically added to the check may be shocked when they see the additional 20% on their check. This is especially true for large groups where the gratuity can easily exceed the value of any single dish served. One incident of this involved the customers [[http://kitchenette.jezebel.com/stories-of-unexpectedly-great-restaurant-customers-1700385036/+emmacar arguing to have the gratuity removed only to leave a tip that was larger than the original gratuity]].
* In possibly the largest in terms of amount case of this ''ever'', [[http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/12/24/pennsylvania-woman-stunned-by-284-billion-electric-bill.html this story]] about a woman who received an electric bill for nearly 300 billion dollars, specifically $284,460,000,000. It was billed in December 2017 with an initial stated required payment of $28,156 and due in full by November 2018. After a call to the utility company from the son, it was discovered that somehow a decimal point had been put in the wrong spot and the real bill was $284.46.
* During TheEighties and TheNineties, it was not uncommon for a UsefulNotes/NineHundredNumber to be advertised to children or teenagers during {{Saturday Morning Cartoon}}s, or after-school TV blocks. Typically, these particular numbers were offering kids the chance to talk to a favorite character or a TeenIdol. (Or, at least someone pretending to be him/her.) Since these numbers charge extra money by the minute (they're premium-rate numbers), the FCC got complaints from parents who got larger bills than they ever thought possible. New laws went into effect concerning these phone numbers: they have to provide an automated message at the beginning of the call stating that they are a pay-per-call service and that the customer will be billed X amount per minute, they have to allow ''at least'' 3 seconds after that message is read during which the caller may hang up without incurring any charges, they must not market any services towards minors, and phone companies must provide their customers with ways to block calls to these numbers and to dispute or contest any errors in billing. (Today, however, these numbers have ''mostly'' gone the way of the dodo thanks to these and other restrictions placed on them, as well as toll-free and local phone numbers, as well as Internet sites and mobile apps that provide many of the same services for free.)
* At the TurnOfTheMillennium, there was a scam that affected landline and cell phone users in the US and Canada. The mark would receive a call from an unfamiliar phone number, stating (variously) that he/she had won a lottery or contest, or needed to settle a debt, or had a family member in distress, or that they had been offered a job, or whatever else might get them to call the number back. When they did, they were routed to a pay-per-call number that had them pushing buttons, or on hold forever, or even routed to a fax machine. It worked because the area code ''looked'' like a regular US or Canadian phone number, but it was actually a phone number from a Caribbean country (809, the Dominican Republic, was a popular choice, although there were several others), and therefore the person on the other end would unwittingly rack up international charges. Emailed warnings about this scam would say that the victims had been taken for tens of thousands of dollars, although that was most likely an error in transcription. (Though they ''were'' still taken for enough that it was noticeable when it showed up on the bill.)
** Similarly, there was another scam that went like this: the mark would receive a call from someone claiming to have been arrested and only getting OnePhoneCall, but that they dialed the wrong number, and needed to be transferred to their spouse/lawyer/etc. by having the mark press *72 and then the number. What they didn't know was that the *72 is the code to initiate call-forwarding. So then the scammer would give out the number that he/she had just told the mark to transfer them to and have their friends/family/colleagues/etc. call them collect on that number, with the victim unaware (except maybe wondering why he/she wasn't receiving calls), until they received a bill with unusual collect, long-distance, and international charges.

** When a British woman on holiday in New York ended up in intensive care, eventually losing a leg, following a vehicle crash, some [[UsefulNotes/BritishNewspapers British media outlets]] focused less on the horror of the incident or the loss of a limb, as on the fact it had happened in the USA. The ''really'' horrific thing was the size of a padded-for-profit American medical bill that the poor woman was sure to get. Speculation abounded as to if it could be kept under seven figures in $US.

* There's a story where the boyfriend and girlfriend are living together, but he suddenly tells her he's breaking up with her and she and her stuff need to be gone before he gets back from his two-week business trip. When he gets back, the apartment is neat, tidy, and in good repair, while all her stuff, and just her stuff, is gone. But like with the joke where the girlfriend breaks in, the phone's been left off the hook, continually calling the time and weather line in Tokyo.

* There's and urban legend in which a couple go through a bitter break up/divorce, to the point where the ex-boyfriend/ex-husband tells his ex-girlfriend/ex-wife that he will be leaving town for two (in some version three) weeks on an important business trip, and since the home and most everything in it is in his name, he orders that she take what little belongings she owns out of ''his'' house before he gets back. When he returns, he finds her stuff gone, but his is still there in neat order, the only thing out of place is the, landline, phone off the hook, and when he checks it he hears a robotic voice saying things in a foreign language, and he hangs up (some versions says that the ex-girlfriend/ex-wife left a mess, and as he was tidying up he simply hung up the phone). However, at the end of the month he gets the phone bill, charging him several thousands of dollars for the long distance call to the information service in a foreign country.

[[quoteright:250:[[WebAnimation/HairKirbyShort https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/painterseap_metaknight_bill.png]]]]

* ''LightNovel/RebuildWorld'':

* ''LightNovel/TheRisingOfTheShieldHero'': When Queen Mirelia was about to banish Malty, she changes her mind and instead hands her a piece of paper, which is a bill for the money demanded of her by the guild. Malty pales in shock at the outrageous amount she owes, a sign of her careless spending of the royal treasury. Naturally, she whines that she can't pay it.

[[caption-width-right:250:Dark times are ahead for Meta Knight.]]

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[[caption-width-right:300:"Remember the trouble we got into with that Speak to Santa Hotline back in Brooklyn?"]]

[[quoteright:300:[[WesternAnimation/SuperMarioWorld https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/shockingly_expensive_bill.jpg]]]]

A character gets the bill for a service they used and is shocked by the price on it. This is usually due to hidden or undisclosed fees that were added on by the unscrupulous merchant. It can also be due to a clueless character ordering expensive services without realizing the cost, or in cases like ExtremelyOverdueLibraryBook, neglecting to pay for something over a long period of time. This presents a conundrum for them as the character doesn't have the means to pay the outstanding balance.

The bill is often related to room service, restaurants, [[CreditCardPlot credit cards]], medical services and, recently, cell phones. It's almost an ObligatoryJoke in an episode where a hospital is essential to the plot.

A less comical example is a form of extortion racket where the business presenting the bill is crooked and has enough "legitimacy" or connections to get away with it. Anyone who refuses to pay the bill is free to "discuss" it in the back with the large burly men.

* The final scene of ''Film/HomeAlone2'' has Buzz being delivered his little brother Kevin's room service bill. Their father, Peter, is not happy.

* Near the end of the story mode of ''VideoGame/TonyHawksUnderground2'', Nigel Beaverhausen tells Tony and the rest of the skaters of the World Destruction Tour that he would promise to pay for the whole tour if they have him film the whole thing in video. Tony and Bam agree right after Phil shows them a bill to pay for the destruction they have cause during the tour, $21,117,55.84 to be exact.

* An old Turkish folktale tells of a poor boy who asks for some food from an innkeeper, promising to pay him back when he can. The innkeeper gives him a bowl of boiled eggs, for which the boy is grateful. Many years later, the boy is now a rich merchant, and returns to the inn to ask how much he owes for the eggs. The innkeeper tries to charge him 10,000 akches, reasoning that the eggs would have hatched into hens and grown up to produce more eggs and more hens if they hadn't been eaten. When the merchant refuses, the innkeeper takes him to court. The folk hero, Nasreddin Hodja, comes along and promises to represent the merchant. At the trial, Hodja comes in late and declares that he's had a genius idea: instead of eating his boiled corn for breakfast, he planted it so he'll harvest it and get rich. The innkeeper scoffs, "That's ridiculous! You can't grow corn from boiled kernels!" Hodja then asks, "Then how can you hatch chickens from boiled eggs?" The court howls with laughter, and the judge not only rules in favor of the merchant, but fines the innkeeper for wasting his time.