The Dobson family say they were shocked when a stolen cellphone led to a $24,000 bill. (Stepanie Mercier/CBC)

A Shuswap, B.C., man is fighting a $24,000 bill after losing his cellphone while on vacation in Peru.

Alex Dobson, 18, told CBC News he didn't mean to bring his phone on an extended backpacking trip through South America with some friends last fall.

"When I went through airport security, I realized my cell phone was still in my pocket," Dobson said on Thursday. "And I thought, well, that's dumb, because I'm never going to use my cell phone, and I just threw it in the bottom of my backpack."

Then halfway through the trip, his backpack was stolen while on a bus in Peru.

"They pulled a fast one on me," he admits, but he didn't think about the phone until he arrived back home in the B.C. Interior in December.

"That's when we saw they had just been adding in these three-month-old charges, and so at that point it was a $13,000 bill," said Dobson. Apparently someone in Peru had been using the phone at $3.49 a minute, and Dobson was getting the bill.

His family contacted Bell Canada and cancelled the phone. The company told them not to pay the charges while they looked into the matter, Dobson's mother Janice told CBC News.

But more bills kept coming, and the phone company eventually decided that, since it was not a case of fraud, the family owed them more than $24,000, she said. A spokesperson for Bell told CBC News they are looking into the case, but Janice Dobson is still angry.

"It's horrible that they can do that, that cellphone companies aren't regulated in some way. If we're eventually held to have to pay it, we'll have to pay it. But I don't want other people to have to pay it," she said.