Scottish Power overcharged me £1300 and are evading making a refund

Nada666

SP Customer - please stop spamming other people's threads with irrelevant rants. You are posting rubbish in lots of threads about Scottish Power. Not once do you answer the original poster's question or address a relevant issue. Kindly keep your whingeing to the one or two threads you have started yourself.

Feel free to bump your own threads to the front page if you are that concerned - but stop annoying other people.

Thank you

(I am not a representative nor have I ever played one...)

dude89

Nada666 wrote: »

SP Customer - please stop spamming other people's threads with irrelevant rants. You are posting rubbish in lots of threads about Scottish Power. Not once do you answer the original poster's question or address a relevant issue. Kindly keep your whingeing to the one or two threads you have started yourself.

Feel free to bump your own threads to the front page if you are that concerned - but stop annoying other people.

Thank you

(I am not a representative nor have I ever played one...)

Could not agree more. The first page is now full of Scottish power posts with no additional helpful information added to them.

spcustomer

Thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't thought of it that way at all, but was more interested in trying to get people to protect themselves.

Scottish_Power

spcustomer the point of the Energy Ombudsman is to independently investigate a customer's complaint and make a decision based on the evidence provided by both parties. Clearly our views in this matter are different. In order to resolve this please contact the Ombudsman.

David

wakeupalarm

scottishpower_company_representative wrote: »

spcustomer the point of the Energy Ombudsman is to independently investigate a customer's complaint and make a decision based on the evidence provided by both parties. Clearly our views in this matter are different. In order to resolve this please contact the Ombudsman.

David

What a complete load of tosh. The whole point of the Energy Ombudsman is to keep energy complaints out of the court system to stop it clogging up. Energy companies are the most complained about business there is.

The energy ombudsman is financed by the energy companies so can hardly be described as independent. They are purely there to mask the serious abuses by energy companies.

Checking any number of threads in this forum about the pitiful response by the ombudsman to complaints by customers will show that they are purely a mechanism for the energy companies to cease resolving problems and pass the buck.

Considering all the energy compaines do is bill customers it is shocking the number of complaints there are. Compare them to Amazon or any other retailer who can manage to bill customers without the millions of complaints the energy companies accumulate.

Then there is the farce that the energy companies claim they are loss making but can still manage to pay themselves massive bonuses and pay there parent companies massive dividends whilst at the same time hiking prices for customers.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-2280170/Scottish-Power-defends-900m-Iberdrola-dividend.html

spcustomer

Thank you wakeupalarm for pointing this out. I have to say I had speculated, and was going to write to the energy ombudsman and ask them who finances them, but didn't.

Interestingly, I complained again to the energy ombudsman the other day, pointing out that now there were several other aspects to my original complaint (and also sorry - I misread the date of my original complaint: it was in 2010 not 2005 as stated).

My new complaint took went thus:


8th February 2013


Dear Sir/Madam

Scottish Power electricity account no. **********

I am trying again to submit a complaint about Scottish Power helping themselves to £1000 out of my bank account. I have submitted this complaint before by email on 5th October 2010 but you have never responded (so perhaps I should complain about your organisation). The wording of my email complaint at that time was:

'I caught SP overcharging me some years ago but the problem is still with me. At the time they admitted to overcharging by £1300 and then sent me a cheque for £300 saying the rest was owing. They tried to account for this by saying that they had been underestimating for the last couple of years or so. I asked them to account for themselves by sending me copies of all back accounts for the past nine years and they told me that they would not do this unless I paid them for the accounts. I was not willing to pay for these as the whole matter was of their making.*

I stopped paying them until I had built up about £1000 alleged arrears and they started threatening me in various ways. They sent Linda Jones,, their local rep, to see me and put things right. During conversation with her she told me that typically a house like mine would have a bill of about £500 per annum, and so I asked her to look at some back bills and the three consecutive bills she looked at came to £850 or so. At this point she told me she had to be going.

I set up standing order for £500 pa to pay my electricity and they have been paid thus ever since, Linda's estimate was almost spot on, but they still keep threatening me,

A meter reading is sometimes followed up by a card asking me to give a meter reading. Last time a card came I tried to phone in the figures and the answering machine cut me off saying it did not recognise my account. The card only mentioned one meter when I have two

I should now point out that as the alleged arrears were £1000, at that time that sum represented more than two years' electricity. I continue to find it difficult to believe they could have made such a massive error in their own favour, and believe it is just an attmept at extortion.

On the 30th September a note arrived from SP telling me they intended to apply for a warrant of entry to install a prepayment meter.

I want them to stop harrassing me and compensate.'


End of quote.


(*they asked for £14 per sheet for back copies).


My complaint now would be much more complex, because they have added many arbitrary charges, they no longer always give meter readings, they do not put their address on the bills, they do not accept telephoned readings, and there is at least one meter reading that is given as an actual meter reading on a date when I was away and the house was shut and locked. (there was no sign of a breakin).


Yours


(spcustomer)

End of quote.

It may be a while before I can publish their response to this for logistical reasons, but I will do so when I can.

Scottish Power rep David: I posted this complaint on the 18th Feb. Perhaps we shall see something happen - although personally I doubt it.

spcustomer

There seems to be no end to this.

I took meter readings today. One of the circuits is completely unused and the fusebox is turned off. It is the circuit which calls itself 'LOW'. I want to tell you about this circuit because whilst I have been using no electricity at all it has continued to clock up chargeable units.

On the 7th January the meter said 65142 (and decimal point)

On the 7th February it said 65221 (and decimal point)

Today it says 65256 (and decimal point)!

This may be peanuts (or not - I don't know), but it seems to me that even if I disconnected the wires where they join onto my circuit it would still be clocking up.

Maybe I should try it.

spcustomer

so far they have done nothing. Watch this space. It might be as exciting as watching paint dry.

spcustomer

(So instead of writing to me the ombudsman service phoned me. That means it will be a struggle for me to give you an exact account of what they said, and I will have to avoid phoning them back until I have rigged up some recording equipment. The story follows).

I found a call allegedly from the ombudsman service on my answering machine yesterday. A lady called either Jo or Joan asked me to ring 0330 4401624 quoting reference no. ****.***

In the light of all the dealings so far it is difficult to know whether this really is the ombudsman service or someone from Scottish Power trying to pull a fast one - and it is also difficult to know what the motivation was. Here are some of the problems:

1. A telephone call does not usually result in the recipient of the call having a record of what was said and so can be be misquoted if it does not turn out as planned. As the ombudsman service is funded by the energy companies they have an incentive to get the energy companies off the hook when there is a complaint. They have the gear to record telephone conversations - and almost certainly do record them for their own records.

2. If the person does not phone back, the ombudsman service can then say that as they did not phone back the matter was closed, and if the customer does phone back the above problem exists and can be used to negate their complaint. After all, it is easy enough to delete an audio recording.

3. I will have no way of knowing who I am communicating with, whilst they will know exactly who they are communicating with.

Not a level playing-field any more than this forum thread is with it's multiple Scottish Power correspondents misguiding the complainant.

Fire_Fox

Psychopath??? Your last post sound paranoid, and you accuse SP of a personality disorder?? Just Google the phone number!