Airalo charged me $850 after I bought a $25 eSIM
I’m curious if anyone else has experienced something similar with Airalo.
I purchased a 15-day, 10GB eSIM for use in the US on July 27. It cost about ¥3,800 (~$25 USD). This was my second time using Airalo. My first experience was a 3-day unlimited eSIM in Guam, and that worked perfectly, so I had no hesitation using them again for my US trip.
The eSIM worked fine during my trip. No issues with the data service whatsoever.
Then I got back to Japan and started looking through the recent charges on my credit card.
On August 3, Airalo charged my card 9 separate times, with each charge being more than ¥10,000. Altogether, the charges totaled more than ¥123,000 — roughly $850 USD. I immediately canceled the credit card.
For additional context, I have confirmed multiple times that auto-renewal was NOT enabled. I also did not have my credit card saved to my Airalo account. The July 27 purchase was made using Apple Pay which always requires faced or password for approval of the payment.
So I have no idea how nine additional charges totaling ¥123,000+ were generated.
I’m currently working through Airalo’s bot chat and their support email (support@airalo.com) trying to get this resolved.
I had a good experience with Airalo the first time and the actual service worked fine this time too — but an unexplained $850 in charges is obviously a pretty serious issue.
I’ll update this post with how Airalo handles it.
Has anyone else experienced multiple unexpected Airalo charges like this, especially when auto-renewal was disabled and the payment was made through Apple Pay?