Delay Repay Letter

longieuk

Hi All,
Just received a letter from my train company saying I owe them money.  I used a only platform called Delay Repay Sniper and they are saying I owe them money and also a huge cost in processing the claims and investigation costs.. anyone else heard about this ?

princeofpounds

I think you are going to need to give us a bit more information than you have... chiefly what the train company actually say.

Sounds like they think you've been making fraudulent delay repay claims and they want the money back plus costs. But that's a total guess and may be utterly wrong, given the lack of detail you've given.

princeofpounds

OK, a quick google suggest the problem may be slightly different to what I suggested. You may have fallen foul of some terms and conditions that prohibit delay repay claims from a third party.

https://abcommuters.com/2018/04/26/commuters-beware-delay-repay-could-get-you-fined-for-doing-absolutely-nothing-wrong/

If this is the issue, the questions are a) whether delay repay sniper really is a third party making the claim, or just an agent/tool. I would say the latter, but I'm not a lawyer. I don't know how the legal situation has panned out - perhaps the ABC followed up on this matter.
b) whether the T&Cs that prohibit this are valid or would be regarded by a court as an unfair term in a consumer contract (and whether that even applies to railway contracts I have no idea).

May be worth popping over to railforums to see if they've heard of the issue either. Again, IF this is the problem.

You should also consider writing to your MP, the Transport Secretary, Passenger Focus to complain. It's pretty shocking behaviour by the train company to penalise perfectly legitimate claims by acting on a rather borderline and possibly invalid clause hidden deep in the T&Cs. 

Beazer

Hmmm. 

Just got a similar letter from Greater Anglia. 

How did you get on?

bubieyehyeh

There is a thread on railforums about this:

https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/greater-anglia-delay-repay-fraud.213418/

moneysavinghero

You should know yourself whether the train you were on was delayed. Should not have to sign up to an app to give you notifications that a train on your route experienced delays. So i can see why the train operators would believe this is fraud.

[Deleted User]

I also received a letter from firstcustomercontact regarding an investigation around some claims that I made in the past (2019-2020). They asked me to provide evidence for five of my trips which go back to 2019 (the most recent of these five was 27.01.2020, which is still more than a year ago). However, they belong to the long past and you might agree with me that it is hard even to remember where I was at these five specific dates, even harder to find evidence about them. I contacted them about it trying to justify 2-3 of the five incidents but the lack of proof drove them to issue me a penalty of almost £500 (£481 to be accurate - please see photo attached). Looking at the letter, I saw that the actual amount of these trips was £116 and the rest are admin fees, which I find so unfair firstly because there is no chance to find any kind of evidence for trips that were made two years ago and also even if I agree to pay the fee (as my final solution) I do not want to pay extra £365 for their admin work (at the end of the day, it is part of their job to investigate these things, so they are already paid for these tasks). I am feeling that they are trying to fish for money due to the lack of income because of the pandemic but on the other side I do not know how to handle this situation.