It's a story that seems ripped straight from the 1990s, but it happened in 2015.

An AT&T phone customer rang up more than $24,000 in long-distance charges over two months with a misconfigured AOL dial-up Internet connection, The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. Eighty-three-year-old Ron Dorff of Woodland Hills is one of the 2.2 million remaining AOL dial-up customers. He lives off monthly Social Security checks and usually pays $51 a month to AT&T. But in March, he got a bill for $8,596.57, and then a bill in April for another $15,687.64.

AT&T initially insisted that he must pay the entire amount of $24,298.93 including late fees, but ultimately waived all of the charges and helped Dorff fix the problem, according to the article.

"Georgia Taylor, an AT&T spokeswoman, said Dorff's modem somehow had started dialing a long-distance number when it accessed AOL, and the per-minute charges went into orbit as he stayed connected for hours," Times reporter David Lazarus wrote. "Taylor said that when the technician visited Dorff's home, he reset the local dial-up number, so the issue should now be resolved."

AOL's website warns customers that they could face long-distance charges if they select the wrong access phone number.

"Warning: You will incur charges on your phone bill if you select an AOL access phone number that is a long-distance call or is not covered by your local calling plan," AOL says. "Please check with your local phone company to determine whether the access phone numbers you select are local for your calling plan. Remember that members on certain plans may be charged an hourly rate for dial-up connections."

This is far from being a new problem. Back in 2002, the New York state attorney generals' office received "more than 50 complaints from customers who received phone bills in the thousands of dollars after a switch in area codes changed their dial-up connection from local to long distance," Computerworld reported at the time.

AOL had more than 25 million dial-up customers at its peak more than a decade ago, a Quartz article last year noted. AOL's latest earnings statement said it still has 2.2 million dial-up subscribers, down from 2.5 million a year earlier. The average revenue from each customer went up from $20.01 in Q4 2013 to $21.18 in Q4 2014.