Miss Sold Internet Package

rainingpain

Hi all,

I'm wanting a little bit of advice, in a nutshell - we purchased a mobile phone + Mobile tarriff + broadband package from a third party company who we believe have miss sold us the package, as our setup cost came to £160+ and our monthly fee is £30 more than it should be.

Outline:
We signed up with a company called OneDirect (third party). We are then handled by a company called Plan.com who package our broadband and internet together into one bill. However our provider is O2. Yes its extremely complicated now..

The problem:
We believe we were miss sold the package, as OneDirect told us the bill would be no more than £5 more than our previous ISP and we would get faster internet. What we now have are huge setup costs and a monthly bill of £95 instead of £76., and our internet is no fast (no fibre).

OneDirects response:
They have tried to resolve the issue by reducing the bill by £5 per month. We are not happy with this as we still have slow internet and a bill in excess of £20 more per month than what we were previously paying. They said if we want fibre we will now have to incur more setup costs for that.

My questions:
Do we have a right to cancel this due to a breach of contract on their part? The problem lies on the fact they didn't tell us about the VAT charge at the point of sale. They are adamant they did tell us, and said they've listened to the recorded conversation, but won't send us it. They also assured us of 'fast internet' which we didn't get.

Current situation:
They keep referring us to the contract that was signed on behalf of us by them. They also made an error in an email stating our contract was infact £76 TOTAL (what it should be), then retracted that comment saying it was a mistake and the actual bill is £76 + VAT. After about 50 emails later we are no further forward to resolving this, even after the director got involved.

Our thoughts:
We feel we've been miss lead, and miss sold. Our setup costs were through the roof and our monthly fee is way more than we were told it would be. What do you guys think we should do? I don't want to simply cancel the direct debit incase they file for court action or try to black list us. Remember we have a £500 phone from them so that also throws a spanner in the works.

Thoughts welcome!

onomatopoeia99

Internet service provision is not a regulated industry in the same way as financial services, so "mis-selling" is not a thing in the same way as with PPI.

If they have a recording, send them a subject access request (google it if you are unfamiliar with the term) and £10 for all the personal data they hold on you, including recordings of telephone calls. My understanding is that under the data protection act they are obliged to provide this and the most they can charge is £10.

forgotmyname

mobile broadband or home broadband? O2 sold their home BB to SKY a long time ago.

Who are you actually with?

DCFC79

Why did you go with OneDirect and Plan.com ?

rainingpain

Sorry for the Delay, I'm not sure who our actual internet provider is, all I know is we are being billed by plan.com. Nothing on our bills says who it is.

Also, I cant give you an answer as to why we went with Plan.com/OneDirect as it was my mother who signed up to it, she will buy anything without thinking. I'm left picking up the pieces.

Current situation is we are still in dispute with OneDirect over email. They are unwilling to terminate the contract so we are going to write to them stating breach of contract. They've passed us through 5 employees now which is really frustrating. The director got involved briefly and offered a small discount but we're still being ripped off.

I'm curious to know what is a common result of cancelling contracts like this. We feel we have a strong case but I don't know to what extent this company will persue in winning a legal battle against us. Personally I think they are scammers and would be shocked if they have any happy customers.

JJ_Egan

Common is they pass the debt to debt collectors .

Do you have any actual evidence of this breach of contract something in writing that is .

rainingpain

We have an email from them stating '£76 total price including VAT' which they messaged us after the contract was formed. Stupidly they made a mistake here so that figure isn't correct, could that go against them?

Also essentially we haven't had our internet upgraded like they said so surely that would go down as verbal misrepresentation? I would assume the breach in contract is the fact they are charging us £95 which isn't written down on any of the contracts we have.

They now want £20 from us to send over the recorded conversations!! They've already cost us almost £400, I'm not paying them money to listen to these they can release them for free when we take this to an ADR.

securityguy

"OneDirect ...We are then handled by a company called Plan.com"

This all looks like managed telecoms for SME. Are you a private user, or a small company?

rainingpain

My mother signed up as a small business I presume. From what I gather this is definitely not a personal package.