Wrongly charged DD - refund?

Does anyone know the legal position here?

I have landline and broadband with Vodafone. Recently I had an intermittent fault, and arranged to have a BT engineer come out to fix it. I was told I would be called to confirm when they would be coming.

A few days later I come home to find a card left by the BT engineer - I hadn't been notified he was coming. I arranged a new date, and the engineer came at the agreed time and fixed the fault.

My next bill appeared... £194! I phoned up to find out what was going on, and I have been charged £85 for each engineer call out.

After much wrangling, they have agreed that they should not have charged me that money. £170 due back to me.

"It will be credited to your account immediately sir".

This is no good to me - I require that money to pay my credit card bill, having run my finances tightly - I will now have to plunder a savings account. My demand for a refund got nowhere - they have said they can not do anything other than credit my account.

I put to them that if I were to close my account then they would have to pay me the money anyway - they don't even respond to that.

What is the legal position? How on earth can they refuse to give me back my own money?

 

Isaac. They have NOT refunded your money, they have effectively given you a credit note. This is totally unnacceptable.
Write to the company HQ, sending your letter by recorded delivery and insist in your letter that they reply to you within 14 days or you will instruct a solicitor to take up the case (dont actually have to).

Just my two penneth worth

 

There has been an article on Watchdog lately about BT charging for external faults. One of the things I do a lot of lately is testing internal phone circuits if a clients broadband fails so my client will be sure not to get a bill.

Now you're an engineer so in your case I have no doubt at all it was an external fault and should never have been charged in the first place

Good luck you will need it I've had too many dealings in cases is like this.

 

That bit has all been done AT - they know they shouldn't have charged me the money. It's a matter of getting it back as money, rather than as a credit.

 

hmmm....

This si why I just stay with orange/wanadoo/whoever they are.

 

I would guess that j and c are right.

It isn't acceptable.

 

Even if you are not with BT for your broadband David BT still look after the line. If there is any fault from the exhange to your master socket it is BTs fault and they have to come out to fix it.

The only way of avoiding BT is Virgin Media.

 

Good point.

 

Quote: "not sure if this applies but can you claim it back from your bank under the DD guarantee .I claimed the FULL amount back when they took my money 5 days early" .


and other.. perhaps helpful morsels

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=115554

 

Isaac, I can't help but I feel your pain. However, I don't understand how BT took your money via DD when your contract is with Vodafone for line and broadband. BT should've charged Vodafone. I won't ask how they know your account details. My bank screwed up my DD a while ago and I ended up in overdraft for a couple of months until it was sorted. I got my money back eventually (as I'm sure you'll do) but it still cost me money in overdraft charges and there wasn't anything I could do about it because it's always hard in these cases to prove it was their fault. If all else fails try contacting Ofcom for advice.

If your contract is not with BT they cannot charge you for repairs. If you think BT are bad wait until you need support from other providers. I agree BT are bad enough but some of the others make them look professional (well almost).

 

BT charged vodafone, vodafone charged me.

 

BT are one of the worst it takes me around 30 minutes on a call to get them to visit a clients house. With Tiscali it takes me seconds

Me: Hello my client has no broadband signal comming into the house, upload/download are both 0kbps, tried a different router, sweapped out the microfilters, remove the faceplate of the master socket, connected router directly into that still no different. Ok sir it does sound like there is a fault on the line (in heavy indian accent) and we will call you to arrange an appointment if one is needed.

Thats it simple. With BT you have to listen to a load of scripts and they don't care when I say I know wht I am talking about and I don#t need to listen to explain badly how to restart the router when I have just told you have spent the last hour doing all that crap.

 

I see. Well in that case Vodafone should not have charged you. I.e. they are are providing a service and fixing faults (whatever it costs them) should be free to you. In any case as you say, they have accepted that they shouldn't have charged you, and will credit the money into your account. Legally I guess that means that they've paid you back, not sure if they are required to do more. I wish there was a way of making them more responsible for their mistakes, or at least pass on the cost of overdraft/credit.

 

I didn't say BT were good, just that there are worse. You mentioned Virgin Media above, here's just one experience. You can Google for more if you like.

 

Hi I-S

Being charged incorrectly can be stressful - especially if you still have bills to pay for the month.

I would hate for you to struggle over payments this month because of these events.

If you send me an email from the Contact Us page of our website with your details and a link to this thread then I will investigate this for you. Make sure you include the code WRT135 in the subject line of the email so that it routes straight to my team.

I'll do everything I can to help.

All the best

Kirsty
Web Relations Team
Vodafone UK

 

I would take BT over Virgin customer service any day.
Virgin are rude, ignorant and uncaring.

 

An update, then...

Today I have asked my bank to begin a DD indemnity claim, standing on the wording of the DD guarantee:

Clearly the credit to my vodafone account is testament to the fact that an error was made.

That proceeding was started at lunchtime, before Kirsty's reply to this thread. I have sent Kirsty an email through the process she described.

To be continued...

 

So, to finish this off... (hopefully!).

I spoke to Kirsty the day after she posted in this thread, and she suggested that I make the DD indemnity claim for the full £194, and she would sort things out such that I received the month's broadband and phone for free, for the inconvenience.

So, I did that and within a couple of days the bank had given me the money back. However, Kirsty works for vodafone mobile, and was thus unable to credit my landline account - instead she credited the same amount to my mobile account, and I had to sort out the month's payment to vodafoneathome.

So, I rang up to do that and the payment got declined (it later turned out that they'd entered the expiry in wrong). I tried to check things with the bank, and got confused messages from the bank, and so tried to go to the branch - the queue was out the door so I gave up for that day and would try again the next day.

The next day, my bank account showed a £170 credit - Vodafoneathome had refunded the money. This was exactly what I had asked for and exactly what they told me they would not do! So now I had it back twice...

I phoned them up once again, and was told that a senior manager had looked at the case and decided that it was "ridiculous" for them to hang onto that amount of money. Funny really, since that's exactly what I'd told them more than a week earlier. I pointed out that they had said they weren't going to refund it and hence the DD indemnity that I had gone through and told them that they should have spoken to me about this before refunding it. They did not disagree...

I paid (once again!) the balance in order to restore everything to where it should be. This SHOULD be the last of it... however, they seem to have significant capacity for screwing it up, so I don't live in hope.

In summary, it seems vodafone mobile are more on the ball than vodafoneathome. When I have a little more time on my hands then I will consider what to do next...