Salt's Gomo chatbot wrongly says roaming data is included, leaving a customer with a bill
A father asked the AI chatbot of Gomo, a mobile brand of Swiss operator Salt, whether his 14-year-old daughter's plan covered mobile data on a school language trip to France; the bot replied that a data package of up to 3 GB was included. It was not, and she received a roaming bill of about CHF 44 despite using well under 3 GB. Gomo first offered to waive the fee only if he moved to a pricier plan; after Swiss broadcaster SRF asked, Salt admitted the chatbot had given wrong information and said it would refund the charges.
Salt said an earlier version of the chatbot had mixed up two different pieces of information in the product description and that the bot had since been optimised. SRF also cited a case reported by Beobachter at the online marketplace Ricardo, whose chatbot told a seller no fees applied to a cash sale; Ricardo insisted on the CHF 70 fee, saying chatbot answers are not binding.
What would have stopped it
Ground a support bot's statements on plan terms in current product data and honour what it tells customers.
Guardrails
- G1 Least privilege Not assessed Did the agent hold only the access the task needed?
- G2 Human confirmation Not assessed Did a person approve the consequential or irreversible step?
- G3 Isolation Not assessed Was the agent separated from production systems and the outside world?
- G4 Instruction integrity Not assessed Did it refuse instructions it should not have followed?
- G5 Truthfulness Failed Bot told the customer 3 GB of roaming data was included when it was not.
- G6 Limits Not assessed Was there a cap on rate, spend, volume or scale?
- G7 Oversight Failed The error surfaced only through the bill; the company conceded after SRF asked.
- G8 Recovery Partial Salt agreed to refund the roaming charges, but only after SRF's inquiry.
Sources
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“Der hauseigene Chatbot schreibt: Ein Datenpaket von bis zu 3 Gigabyte sei im Abo eingeschlossen.”
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“Salt werde dem betroffenen Kunden die entstandenen Roaming-Gebühren erstatten.”
Confidence 73% comes from these sources alone. How we score
History
- 15 Oct 2026Entered in the register with 2 sources