British Gas have given our details to debt collectors - it's not our account!

skiffle

Hi all,

Long time lurker, have never posted before. I'm looking for some advice on how to best handle this situation.

My housemate and I moved in to our house last September. We immediately took meter readings and went about setting up our gas/electricity accounts. This was a bit of a struggle. We'd been told by the letting agent that we were with Scottish Power, but upon phoning them they said they had no record of the house or the meters. They looked up the meters in some database and said we should call Scottish Gas. We did so, and Scottish Gas had the same problem - the meter numbers didn't match what they had down for our address and the meter readings were wildly different. They also struggled to work out our correct address - we do not have a number on our house, just a name, and they seemed to think we were living in No.11 which is in fact next door to us. After a couple of days of calling back and forth we established that Scottish Gas was not the supplier to the property and it was in fact Scottish Power. At some point my housemate had given his bank details to Scottish Gas, believing that we were going to have to set up an account with them. We went back to SP and this time they set us up an account with no problems. At some point SG had set up a direct debit on my flatmate's account, which he cancelled before they took any money. We have paid all our bills to Scottish Power since moving in.

In around Nov/Dec last year, my housemate received a text from a debt collection agency. He called them and it seemed that British Gas had passed his details on to them for a debt of around £25. He told them that this debt did not belong to us, and they said we should call BG. We did this and BG agreed the debt had nothing to do with us and said they would recall it from the debt collectors and remove all my housemate's details from it. We then called the debt collector again and they said that everything was fine.

Today, we received more of these text messages, and in addition we have now had two threatening letters from a different collection agency, again about gas and electric accounts with BG. My housemate has made a call to both the debt collectors and BG again explaining the situation. It seems that BG have removed all my flatmates details and "accidentally" left his phone number on the account. It also transpires that these accounts are for meters that are not in our property, and had a final reading provided sometime in October (we have not provided a final reading to anyone, nor have we had the meter man round - our meters are inside the property). The situation so far is that the debt collectors are no longer chasing after my flatmate, but "the occupiers" of our house (i.e. both of us), even though this debt is not ours.

What would you advise we do in this situation? We are sitting down to write a letter tonight - are there any important things you think we should mention?

Thanks guys!

zzzLazyDaisy

My son had this experience. It went on for months, and culminated in BG threatening to get a court order to disconnect the gas. He was not, and never had been a customer of BG. At first the demands were coming to a named person (not him) and when he contacted them and said that the person had never lived at the house which was previously owned for years by an old lady who had died there, they then changed the demand to 'the occupiers'. In fact his was worse because BG insisted that they were still supplying the gas to the property, and he had to pay them and sort it out with his current provider (who he had inherited from the old lady).

In the end he got his current provider ti check the transco records which says which provider is supplying gas to which property. Armed with this information he went back to BG and kept asking to speak to the person's manager until he was passed to someone who could deal with it. It turned out that when the gas was moved from BG, it was taken off theone data base but not another and it had been spotted as a stray account and reinstated. They never explained the mystery of the unknown named customer.

So based on that experience, I'd suggest that you go to your own provider and ask them either to contact BG on your behalf with the information needed to prove that you are in fact a customer of theirs, or to give you the information necessary to prove it yourself, and go as far up the food chain as is necessary.

Be warned though - you may be asked to put it in writing to the "complaints department" which appears to be based in a blackhole somewhere in la-la-land where they can receive incoming mail and calls but are prevented by some weird forcefield from ever replying......

undaunted

I think you are doing the right thing now - ie always write in such cases don't rely on the phone / often poorly trained staff in call centres.

Personally I'd write to British Gas and not the so called debt collector.

Tell them what date you moved in and the meter reading at the time, give the landlord / letting agents details should they wish to verify this with them. Advise them that you have no knowledge of any previous occupier (obviously assuming this is true) and therefore suggest they contact the landlord / letting agent if they have any further queries in that regard as you do not wish to be contacted again by either them or their agents with regard to this matter.