Just tried to cancel my AA Roadside Home-Start.

mrsmortenharket

Myself & husband have a joint Lloyds TSB joint bank account. It comes with AA cover & a few other bits & pieces.
So last July he is away on business. I go out to the car & I have a completly flat tyre. I am unable to fix it.
Go to other car. The steering has gone (that cost £850 to fix, it was a serious problem!)
Very Bad Luck! :eek:
So call up as we have AA with the bank to discover it doesn't do homestart.
I upgrade & pay whatever the fee what. Whatever it was, when dh got back he wasn't happy! But he wasn't here & I unfortunatly had 2 non-working cars. :eek::cool:
AA man patched up tyre enough for me to get it to tyre shop for repair. The other car stumped him!

Anyway, to get to the point!

I call up to cancel it as it's due for renewal on 14th July.

I am unable to cancel it. It's not in my name. I didn't open it.

So I relay to the man the above. Emphasising that the AA have never once spoken to my husband & that the bank account is joint. My husband is not the primary & I am not the secondary. It is an account we opened together.

So he tells me due to data protection he is unable to close the account.
So I asked him about my data protection. As apparently this account wasn't opened by me. Except it was.

He told me that anyone could open an aa account in anyone elses name but only the named person could close it down.

He spoke to his manager as I stumped him with my questions.

My question being, so I could call up, open an account for Joe Bloggs & that would be ok. No he said, that would be fraud. So I say, yes exactly. So has fraud been committed. No he says. :cool:
He then told me, it's just the way it is.

So I asked to speak to the manager. I am concerned that this appears to be in my husbands name when I called up & at no point noone has spoken to my husband. He told me the manager was unavailable. The manager he had just spoken to.

Listen folks! I don't want compensation or anything.

Just an answer from them & the best way forward.

I know my dh will have to call them but I will certainly be making a complaint.

At no point should have this ma told me anyone could open an account in anyones name nor should I be told it's just the way it is. It isn't professional!

I've worked in a call centre & know all the excuses in the book..manager in a meeting etc etc & I told this man this.

I also understand the DPA hence me being slightly confused by the nam c)ckup on opening the account!

Thank you for reading!

Oh & I was very polite throughout. Having been on the other side I know these types of calls are not very nice. And if you're horrible you don't get anywhere!

Edit to add: manager supposed to be calling me back. I am not holding my breath!

bazster

Just stop paying them. If you are paying by direct debit or standing order, contact your bank and cancel it. If you are paying by continuous credit card mandate, 'phone the card company and report the card lost - you will then get a new one with a different number so any CCM's already set up will stop working. If the renewal payment is a one-off payment, just don't pay it.

PZH

Who's name is the AA acount in / on the Renewal letter ?

The issue is, as you realise, with the AA Account being in a sole name despite the Bank account being in joint names.

I am surprised though that they let you upgrade the account in the first place if it was not in your name.


From the AA's point of view - you could be trying to cancel the account for malicious reasons (not that you are) so I can understand their concern.

wealdroam

bazster wrote: »

If you are paying by continuous credit card mandate, 'phone the card company and report the card lost - you will then get a new one with a different number so any CCM's already set up will stop working.

That simply isn't true.

The payments will continue and be debited to the then current credit card account.

bazster

wealdroam wrote: »

That simply isn't true.

The payments will continue and be debited to the then current credit card account.

Erm, no, there is no mechanism by which that could happen. A CCM is not like a Standing Order, it's up to the payee to collect on it, it doesn't happen automatically. In the normal course of events the credit card company doesn't even know that a CCM exists and it certainly doesn't inform anyone that there is a new card number. All that happens is that the payee tries to collect on the old number and, just as for any other collection against that number, the payment is refused.

I've done it a couple of times when companies (ISP's!) ignored my requests to cancel a service. They then contact you to request the new card details, which of course you decline to provide.

When you call a card company to report a card lost they expressly warn you that any regular payments will have to be set up again with the payees.

CCM's are in any case doomed now that CVV's are becoming more widely used, because card payees are expressly forbidden in their agreement with the card processing company to store CVV's for longer than it takes to process the transaction.

wealdroam

Continuous Payment Authorities operate on the account to which the card is linked, so even if a card is 'lost' and replaced with a card with a different number but linked to the same account, payments continue.

The retailer still continues to use the old card number, because as you say he knows no different, and the card issuer pays out. The card company of course knows which account to take the money from.

Here is The Consumers Association's take on this.

This has been discussed at length on MSE.
Here is just one lengthy thread, and some posts echo your view Bazster.

Bazster, can you please post a link confirming your view, because I cannot find anything.
Thanks.

fluffnutter

I'm a little bit confused. Whose name is this policy in? The way I see it, at present, no one can ever cancel this policy which is patently ridiculous. If it's in both your names (it being a joint account) then just write a letter signed by you both saying you wish to cancel. This is just some 'computer says no' moment that I'm sure will be resolved once someone applies a bit of common sense.

fluffnutter

And, btw, those free bits and pieces you get with your Lloyds account are generally a complete waste of money. Most of it you'd never use anyway, the rest is poor quality (as you've discovered). Far better to not pay the bank the (sometimes extortionate) fees and get the bits and pieces you need direct from the companies as and when you need them. The OH was paying £144 a year for nothing recently. A breakdown policy he didn't use because we didn't have a car and mobile phone insurance (that never pays out). Ditch all that rubbish and save yourself some pennies.

hcb42

I would cancel it with Lloyds, not the AA? Have you tried that.

(FWIW I think the Lloyds policy is good value for the AA and holiday insurance alone, and have claimed on both...I have the full AA cover included)

meer53

bazster wrote: »

Erm, no, there is no mechanism by which that could happen. A CCM is not like a Standing Order, it's up to the payee to collect on it, it doesn't happen automatically. In the normal course of events the credit card company doesn't even know that a CCM exists and it certainly doesn't inform anyone that there is a new card number. All that happens is that the payee tries to collect on the old number and, just as for any other collection against that number, the payment is refused.

I've done it a couple of times when companies (ISP's!) ignored my requests to cancel a service. They then contact you to request the new card details, which of course you decline to provide.

When you call a card company to report a card lost they expressly warn you that any regular payments will have to be set up again with the payees.

CCM's are in any case doomed now that CVV's are becoming more widely used, because card payees are expressly forbidden in their agreement with the card processing company to store CVV's for longer than it takes to process the transaction.

You are wrong. Payments can be claimed from a cancelled CC by a retailer. I work a daily report which contains hundreds of this type of transaction where customers have cancelled their cards thinking this is what will happen. Unless you notify the retailer they will continue to claim against the number they hold on their files, these payments will debit a suspense account within the bank, the bank will then contact the customer and advise them that they need to contact the retailer to give them their new card number for future payments. These can only be disputed if the agreement has been cancelled by the customer, not by the bank.

Your comment about CVV numbers is also incorrect, retailers who accept Continuous Authority payments don't need a CVV number or even an expiry date to collect the money once the agreement has been set up.

bazster

I already told you that on a couple of occasions I reported a card lost in order to stop an unwanted continuous payment when the ISP ignored my cancellation requests. It worked like a charm: the companies concerned contacted me to request new card details, which I didn't supply, and I never heard from them again.

If you don't believe me then that's your prerogative, but I know what I know.

I read the implausible stuff on that other thread about only the 1st 13 digits of the number being checked, but I lost my wallet last year (yes, I really did lose it!) and I had to get three new credit cards. One of the new cards has six digits different to the original one, another has seven different digits, and the third has eight different digits. There is no way a payee can collect a payment if they don't know the number to collect against! Simples.

A payment will even fail if your card has expired and the payee doesn't know the new expiry date.

n.b. I design and build subscription processing systems among other things, so I do know a bit about this.