My brother is under house arrest, quite possibly for the next decade. Options

[*Libertie*]

So my brother, 18, has been using the phone a LOT lately. Last night I found out that he's actually been calling some girl in Australia. I didn't know about this or I'd have said something, but he told my mom that he was just using regular anytime minutes. When I found out about this, I flipped out and showed them the Cingular site where it had the rates listed (upwards of $3 per minute!). This prompted my mom to check out her phone bill. The grand total is so unbelievable that it needs to sit on its own line:

SIX. THOUSAND. DOLLARS.

My mom's credit is already bad enough, so this is a nightmare. I'm gonna have to go with her and take out a loan so she can pay the bill, and I honestly don't know what's gonna happen to my brother. This is insane.

[multifaceted]

Wow. Okay. And I thought running up a bill of 1500 dollars was a lot.

He should pay at least some of it back. He's 18. He can get a part-time job.

I don't even use up a lot of my minutes. I have 600 minutes I can use for every two years. That was when I went to public school and my mom and dad made me call them to make sure I was okay when I got off the bus.

Now that I have online schooling, I only use it like once every week for less than a minute. I still have 600 minutes because that is the cheapest and lowest number of minutes for the plan. The rest of the minutes I can use on other things.

I am not allowed to text because my dad yelled at me for running up my bill to $40. And that is a lot less than $6000