UK iOS 5 Users Being Billed For iMessage?

Over in our forums, user IllusionEntity has discovered something quite worrying: he’s getting billed for iMessages:

I have just received my monthly bill and it seems that I have been billed for all of my iMessage messages!! I have been billed for each individual message and I know it is iMessage because it is iMutter’s number. I have been billed £102.49 for all of the iMessage usage! So steer clear of iMessage! I am in the uk just so you know.

Unfortunately, since iOS 5 is still in beta, I wasn’t able to look around the official Apple dev forums to see if this is a problem others were having. Have any of our other users been hit by this? Is your carrier forcing you to pay for iMessages, which are meant to be free?

Here’s my gut-feeling about what’s going on: does Apple have to okay iMessaging with the carriers before it rolls out? If so, it might be that since the OS is still in beta, they haven’t okayed the new protocol with carriers outside of the USA, and as such, they’re being treated as SMS messages.

If any of our other members have experienced anything similar, we’d really like to know about it.