MSE News: I got £1,120 back from old direct debit

A pensioner has managed to reclaim a whopping £1,120 after doing an audit of her direct debits and realising she'd been paying for more than five years for broadband she didn't use...
Read the full story:
'I got £1,120 back after finding a forgotten direct debit I'd been paying for FIVE years'
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Comments

  • miller
    miller Posts: 1,676 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    H3G - the 'H' part presumably refers to Hutchison Whampoa the holding company for 3 which became defunct on 3 June 2015 according to Wikipedia:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutchison_Whampoa

    Hutchison Whampoa merged with Cheung Kong Group to form CK Hutchison Holdings.

    If the narrative on the Direct Debit had been changed at that point, the person concerned may have noticed sooner; better still why not use 'Three' or '3'.
  • aj23_2
    aj23_2 Posts: 1,155 Forumite
    1,000 Posts Third Anniversary Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    Didn't she check her current account for 5 years?
  • HornetSaver
    HornetSaver Posts: 3,732 Forumite
    1,000 Posts Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    If the subject were 19 or 29 there'd be a dozen comments about how much money younsters have to throw away today.
  • FredaJones
    FredaJones Posts: 30 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10 Posts Combo Breaker
    A 29 year old is a "youngster"?
  • Please can anyone help me!! We are in the same situation!

    My husband took out a mobile phone contract several years ago, but when his contract was up he bought a new contract with the intention to cancel the old one. Due to his anxiety he put off cancelling this and forgot about it and has been paying for this.

    When I went through his bank statement several years later, we could not figure out what it was and T mobile would not give us any information as we did not know the phone number. Subsequently we had to cancel this direct debit through our bank to cut it off at the source as T mobile had been so unhelpful.

    Several months after cancelling this direct debit, he has now received a letter from some company or solicitor, stating T mobile sold his contract to them due to non payment of £68.36. We never received any letters asking for money, and as we had paid thousands on a contract he wasn't using, are quite shocked and confused as to where this sudden "non payment" has come from!

    Is there any point in us trying to claim any of the money back? How on earth do we go about this?

    Any help gratefully appreciated.
  • ziggycj
    ziggycj Posts: 321 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 100 Posts Combo Breaker
    She's lucky she got refunded. It's her own fault. Should check your statements properly. It's not like she had medical or other circumstances why she couldn't have been paying more attention to what she was spending.
  • pmduk
    pmduk Posts: 10,670 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    mrsngill10 wrote: »

    Is there any point in us trying to claim any of the money back? How on earth do we go about this?

    You've got an uphill struggle, as you admit that the contract was not cancelled. As such, you've had access to the service all of the time.

    I'll hazard an educated guess that you 've probably moved and/or changed email addresses, since taking out the contract? This is often the cause for such situations as you don't receive communications from the network.
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