Changing electricity suppliers without permission, possible scam?

thatgirlwho

I received a letter about 10 days ago from my N-Power, my electricity supplier to say sorry I was leaving and another, the same day from Southern Electric to welcome me to them. This was news to me and my partner and neither of us had requested this transfer. I called N-Power and they told me they had received a request to transfer to Southern Electric and that I would have to call them to see why this transfer was taking place.

So I called Southern Electric and they told me that a company had requested the transfer (although they would not tell me which company) and that there was nothing I could do about it. This made me angry but I decided to go to my Estate Agents (I've only lived in my property for about 2 months) to see if they had passed on our details, which they had not.

So I called Southern Electric again and this time they told me the company who requested the transfer was Hallmark and still told me there was nothing I could do. After some arguing the lady on the phone agreed to talk to the transfer department to see what was going on and to see if perhaps our details had been given to them by mistake. They promised me a call back the next day with news (it was 7:30pm and the call centre closed at 8pm) so I agreed.

Next day I receive no call back so at 4pm I called Southern Electric again and they tell me the person from the transfer department will call me back in 10 minutes, which he does. And he tells us that our details had been given to them by Birmingham City Council by mistake and that I will go back to N-Power and I won't owe Southern Electric anything.

Is this legal? Can any old company ring up an electric supplier and get your supply changed, and you not to be able to do anything about it? People have told me this is a scam and British Gas have been fined for something similar.

I'd really love some information about this.

spiro

There can be various causes of this:

1) Supplier typed in wrong meter point reference number,
2) Customer provided wrong meter point reference number,
3) Supplier selected wrong meter point reference number when searching by address,
4) Dodgy salesman fills sales form without customer permission.
5) Salesman writes down wrong meter point reference number

jalexa

thatgirlwho wrote: »

Is this legal? Can any old company ring up an electric supplier and get your supply changed, and you not to be able to do anything about it?

This was (apparently) a mistake, so not "illegal", but "erroneous". A "fraud" would be illegal (and erroneous).

NPower, however, have behaved as only NPower can. The whole point about the "sorry you are leaving" letter is to allow you to detect and challenge an erroneous transfer. NPower should have dealt with this on your behalf (and funnily enough their's) at the first time of asking.

Southern Electric didn't cover themselves in glory either but you never had any contract with them, so rightly there was little they could say. Their advice however was p*ss poor for any supplier and particularly for a self-trumpeted good customer service supplier.

Submit a formal complaint to NPower and demand ex-gratia compensation.

If you hadn't found out in time there is a Consumer Focus template letter here...

http://cfe.custhelp.com/ci/fattach/get/304//session/L2F2LzEvc2lkL2h1RHVMd0Fr

thatgirlwho

Thankyou to both of you for your input.

I was really miffed with N-Power as it did say on the letter that they would try and stop the transfer. I will write a formal complaint to NPower, hopefully that will get me somewhere.