Sky owe me £740!

whodatninja

Hi all, this is my first post so be gentle!

My Sky bill has been getting higher recently (as has everyones) so I decided to investigate a bit. I just have one SkY+ HD box, used to have Multiroom but cancelled it in July 2012. I have been a Sky customer since 2003. I noticed on the Bill it had an additional charge of £10.00 a month for a Sky + subscription under extra charges, looked at my previous bills and they all had this for the last year at least

Thought this to be strange so rang Sky and talked to a very helpful chap who informed me this was for recording capabilities on my second box......which I had cancelled in 2012 and has been sitting in my loft in storage ever since!

My account was still showing two viewing cards, he has cancelled the obsolete one so I won't be charged any more in the future. Not only have I not been using the box but the cabling to it was removed a couple of years ago by Sky engineers when I had my dish re-positioned!

It looks like they have been charging me £10 a month ever since I cancelled my multi-room six years ago. Fair enough I should have noticed this a long time ago but thats a lot of money I have paid for something I wasn't using.

So a few questions for you good people:

Has this happened to anyone else out there?

If I cancel multi-screen did I need to separately cancel the record function too? (I know some people pay it to carry on recording from Freesat).

What are the odds on me getting the full amount back from Sky?

Do they have the capability in their systems to check the obsolete viewing card to see the last time it has been used at all or more specifically the last time it was used to record anything?

Sky say they are going to look into it and get back to me so I will wait to see what the outcome is, I have never had any issues with them before to be fair.

Thanks a lot for reading.

justry4n

I'm assuming they would have the capability to check if the card has not been used, as this is how they tackled card sharing.

As for the refund, I normally threaten to contact Ofcom. They normally move mountains to avoid this then.

Bigphil1474

OP, sounds like there are 2 possibilities. 1, you have been paying for a service you cancelled, so you should be due a refund. Or, 2, you didn't properly cancel the service in total, so were paying for a service you didn't use, but Sky weren't necessarily aware - you may not get a refund. As it's an amount worth pursuing, then put your heart and soul into it - keep it polite but persistent. Please let us know how you get on.

iniltous

Wasnt the charge for an extra 'muti-screen' box from Sky £10 a month ( same as keeping the Sky + functions if you quit ) so it seems odd ( and perhaps you could argue the point ) that if you didn't want to pay £10 a month for an extra box with the same Sky channels as the main Sky box, why would you be happy to pay £10 for only the free to air /free to view channels with record functions.

They do not know that you were not using the second box ( multi room boxes were supposed to be plugged into the phone line , but I doubt it applys to 'freesat' Sky boxes' ) so that argument will carry no weight, it's what was said at the time you 'cancelled' the full service multi room box, if Sky said 'OK , we will remove the paid for channels and leave you with the free channels , do you want to keep the record functions for £10 ?' And you said OK, then even if that was a terrible deal ( paying the same for less ) you agreed , and it's not their fault you didn't use it, if they never mentioned that keeping the record functions costs £10 a month, and it was never asked for or agreed by you, then you have a case, but how to prove it after more than 6 years ?.
I suspect they will make you an offer , no where near the £740 you want, possibly around a years fee (£120)

bubblegun

In the old days if Sky Multiscreen (as was Multiroom) was cancelled and the advisor only selected the the multiscreen subscription then they would continue to be charged for the Sky+ part. They were trained to also add Sky+ to the cancellation but lots of people forgot to do this.



Many years ago ( more than 4 years now) an update was applied to the system that meant that the Sky+ was automatically added to the cancellation unless the customer asked to keep it then the advisor would remove the Sky+ from the cancellation order.


Sky+ is £10 per month if you have no channels active on a viewing card.


As long as the notes state you cancelled Multiroom (it was called this 7 years ago) and didn't ask to keep Sky+ on that box then you are likely to get almost all of the money back.

The contact centre can only refund up to 2 years. Further back will need to be emailed to an escalation team who investigate and usually apply high value refunds back to your bank account within 7 days of them processing it.


The advisor should fix the issue on the initial call before they email the escalation team. Did they state that they had done this?