admiral direct debit nightmare

duncanf

sorry if ive posted this in the wrong place!

admiral car insurance wrongly calculated my premium at the start of this year when i changed my car, causing them to apply for multiple direct debit payments from my account. they already had a agreement with me to only take payments after the 15Th of each month which they also broke. In my first few call to them they basically blamed me one even told me that i should sort out my finances! here is a timeline of there requests to my account!


08/5/09 d/d admiral insurance 79.55 paid

03/6/09 d/d admiral insurance 79.55 refused - charged £38

15/6/09 d/d admiral insurance 79.55 paid

30/6/09 d/d admiral insurance 79.55 refused - charged £38

10/7/09 d/d admiral insurance 79.55 refused - charged £38

21/7/09 d/d admiral insurance 95.50 paid


this all happened when my bank account was at its lowest for months incurring me bank charges totaling £114. trying to sort this out has cost me £37 pounds in call costs! i finally got hold of a manager who has agreed to refund the first two bank charges and £25 of my call costs plus £50 in compensation, and will refund the other charge when i can provide evidence(next months bank statement). the payment on the 21/7/09 should not have been taken out of my account, so admiral told me to contact my bank and request the payment back under the direct debit agreement and that the money would be put back immediately! that was four days ago and after phoning my bank today they said there still awaiting a reply for admiral. even with the compensation payment i still feel Ive been had over! is there anything else i can do to sort this out?

Tia dunk

MurdochMcMaster

Nightmare! Did they say why they'd made the mistake? You'd better check with your bank that Admiral only have the one DD set up or you might have to go through all this again.

duncanf

yeah they told me one of there customer services ppl calculated it wrong at the time of the car change, causing there computer to apply for multiple payments! defo only the one direct debit! shudder to think what would happen if they had more!!!

duncanf

is this the best i can get or is there a ombudsman that i can complain to? should they have asked me to contact my bank to get the payment refunded?

rich_months

duncanf wrote: »

so admiral told me to contact my bank and request the payment back under the direct debit agreement and that the money would be put back immediately! that was four days ago and after phoning my bank today they said there still awaiting a reply for admiral.

Interesting - I thought refund under the direct debit guarantee were pretty much instant. The one and only time I've used it it was back in my account the next day.

Incidentally, I have used Elephant, a subsidiary of Admiral, and know how useless this sorry excuse of a company is. You have my sympathy.

duncanf

whats annoying me is that there only willing to pay £25 of the £37 in calls and only £50 in compo, does anyone think i should be squeezing more out of them?

RadoJo

I would say that they should cough up for any financial penalties they caused plus phone charges, and then maybe a goodwill gesture of some kind on top (although that's at their discretion of course).

In your shoes I would write them a letter (sent recorded delivery) detailing all the charges you incurred (with copies of your bank statements included - you can blank out anything you don't want them to see), the times and lengths of the phone calls you had to make and a short paragraph about how you are disappointed with their service and would appreciate them resolving the matter asap. Don't ask for any more than you are actually out of pocket by and leave them to offer you something more - they might, they might not, but if you ask, they might be tempted to assume you are milking it.

Give them a certain length of time in the letter (14 days seems reasonable if you can wait that long for the money) and tell them that if they are unable to resolve this to your satisfaction then you will contact the financial ombudsman.

Have you put anything in writing to them before? It may be that they want to see proof of your out of pocket expenses before they will consider reimbursing them fully.