Urgent Warning - Avro and Octopus taking the same direct debit. Check your bank account.

wakeupalarm

Everyone should cancel their Avro Energy direct debits now and setup a new one with Octopus Energy.

However

mikejtforum said:

Thanks, this is where I am at now. When you say if the issue is not resolved you will reduce the DD to £1 are you referring to the existing Avro DD or the new one with Octopus?. I have emailed Octopus a couple of times asking what I should do now and they have failed to respond despite the guff they put in their last update email stating they will reply to enquiries on the same day!

I have just checked my bank account and I now see that there are two DDs active - the original for Avro and a new one for Octopus. Octopus appears to have transferred across the details of my Avro DD from Avro as a 'copy' not as a 'move', but the data was dormant and the live DD itself was only 'triggered' when I came along and tried to create it. Since I have received no confirmation message of whether I did create it or I merely updated it, I can only surmise Octopus have used data already gleaned from Avro (the date, the amount) to add to the information I entered myself for the new DD. I am ill-disposed towards being left to second guess what is supposed to happen, what has happened, and what will happen. People these days seem incapable of communicating at all, never mind accurately and concisely.

However, I guess, on the due date of my next DD - 26th Nov - two payments will be taken out.This is NOT what was supposed to happen.

I was going to change the DD amount using the Octopus dashboard to mitigate the effect of two payments going out. I might still do this. And now, I might also simply cancel the Avro DD.

MWT

However said:

I was going to change the DD amount using the Octopus dashboard to mitigate the effect of two payments going out. I might still do this. And now, I might also simply cancel the Avro DD.

 No reason not to cancel the Avro DD at this point and if you don't, you very likely will get both of them taken and there is certainly no point in that...

mikejtforum

I had a response today from Octopus to my enquiries, their advice in respect of DD…

 “ …In the meantime, we would advise setting up a new direct debit instruction with Octopus and cancelling your instruction with Avro to ensure that this does not continue as we have found that there is going to be quite a delay with receiving payments from Avro.”

wakeupalarm

mikejtforum said:

I had a response today from Octopus to my enquiries, their advice in respect of DD…

 “ …In the meantime, we would advise setting up a new direct debit instruction with Octopus and cancelling your instruction with Avro to ensure that this does not continue as we have found that there is going to be quite a delay with receiving payments from Avro.”

So Octopus Energy themselves are now recommending cancelling Avro Energy direct debits and setting up a new one with Octopus Energy.

brewerdave

I've been thru 4 *SOLR processes before these latest failures and cancelled the DD to the failed Co. as soon as it was announced.
Only created one issue when First Utility (now Shell) wanted to charge me a higher daily standing charge "because there wasn't a DD set up". - won that argument when I pointed out that they hadn't asked me for details for a DD!