Bill Haggling Website

dave2k

Hi,

I am a software developer and I thought of a service which may be of use to you...

How about a website which does the bill haggling for us? Not everyone has the time to spend ages talking to people on the other end of the phone.

The website would take any details required by sky/bt/etc and would do the negotiations on your behalf, and would notify you if any progress is made.

The way I envision it currently is that you'd pay in a small fee, perhaps £15, which would cover the cost of the negotiating. If no deal happens, you get your money back. If a better deal is negotiated, you don't get the money back, and you contribute a small % of your savings to the website.

Thoughts please!

Carrot007

Sounds good but is against the terms and consitions for pretty much all services.

Pretending to be people would be fraud. So they would have to give permission for you to act on their behalf which would be too much of a pain that most people would not bother.

dave2k

I wouldn't pretend to be anyone!

Many of these services (sky and bt for example) allow you to request on behalf of people.

bt, you need some personal details:
bt phone number
full name
account number
address
postcode

sky, you may need the username and password.

mije1983

They will only talk to people other than the account holder if the account holder has given permission for Mr/Mrs X to discuss the account on their behalf. They also usually ask 'are you the account holder'. If you say no they won't talk to you, if you say yes then you are pretending to be someone else.

I don't know about BT, but Sky's terms (used to?) prohibit the disclosure of your username & password to 3rd parties.

You'd also have the obstacle of convincing people you were genuine enough to hand over their passwords etc.

The best deals usually come when you have cancelled, and again, usually only the account holder can process that cancellation.

Edit: Sky's terms state:

Each registered user is responsible for the security and proper use of their user name and password and must not disclose either to any third party (whether directly, via a Website or application interface or otherwise)