Barclaycard....Advice needed

At 15:15:41 on 12/07/2006, John delighted uk.finance by announcing:

No.

I'm not sure I understand this comment.

Thats what they have done to me. Fortunately in the past changing the card issue has prevented this.

No I'm not surprised you don't understand. If a service is paid for in advance why do companies need to have the right to take money from a customer's account against the customer's wishes.

I liked the traditional model where the customer pays in advance and the service is provided,or the customer does not pay in advance the service is not provided. Simple, so why do we need to involve debt collectors?

It seems to me that the model of a customer paying in advance to continue a service if he is happy and not paying if he is not is a good one.

The model The model where a customer is pursued by debt collectors for a service that he didn't want (and could have been canceled as soon as the advance payment was missed) is not a good one.

At 15:41:59 on 12/07/2006, John delighted uk.finance by announcing:

And if you had cancelled the CCA then you could have instructed your card issuer to charge the amount back.

If you signed up for a CCA then it's not against your wishes. If you wish to cancel a CCA then you should do so with the retailer.

And if it's a recurring service you can use SO, DD or CCA rather than contact the service provider each period.

Erm, we don't?

Then cancel it as per the terms you agreed to.

I canceled the account. I owed them nothing they should have taken nothing. I don't know if that is the same as cancelling the CCA. As it was I didn't have to spend a lot of time and effort working out how to get my money back because they never got it in the first place.

As I said I did. In fact on the only two occasions that I have canceled CCA contracts the company has overcharged (or tried to) me at the end of the contract. Not much, but still annoying.

No this isn't true many companies do not offer SO. I chose a credit card payment because naively I thought it safer than a DD. I would never chose either DD or CCA if I could pay in another way or get the service elsewhere.

No no one needs to lose out. The companies are pushing credit onto people who don't want it.

As I said I did. But the whole model is a con to get people to stop thinking about how much they are paying and to get them to pay for stuff they don't want.

At 17:11:28 on 12/07/2006, John delighted uk.legal by announcing:

Then I don't understand the problem. Weren't we talking about retailers taking money after cancelling CCAs?

They can't really refuse them. Any company that accepts a payment via "phone/internet banking" or direct transfer will accept a SO and they won't even know it *is* a SO.

I have no problems with choosing DD. Any problems are sorted with a 2 minute call to the bank requesting the refund they're obliged to give. I've never had a problem with CCAs either and I enjoy getting the cashback on regular bills.

I meant "What debt collectors?"

Many companies such as ISPs (BT Openworld in my case, then the only supplier) only allow an account to be opened if you agree to pay DD or CCA. If I could choose to pay SO I wouldn't complain. But not only do the insist that they can take an unlimited amount of money from my account they regularly mess it up.

The OP was being threatened with debt collectors.

An increasingly common ploy is for a company to start charging an extra few pounds for payments unless they are made by DD. This is a major problem when the company is in a monopoly position... Telewest being a prime example.

This sort of thing hits the poorer members of society most... that is those people who cannot guarantee having a sufficient amount of money in a particular bank account to meet bills by DD. Or they may even not have a suitable bank account.

Axel

;-)

Well if they can't afford DD, they can't afford cable tv then!

Acknowledged.

No. What is happening is that they can afford cable TV (or telephone or Internet)... the service would be cut off if they could not... but are just not in a position for it to be paid automatically from a specific bank account and are being charged extra for paying it from other accounts or maybe in cash.

Some people can afford to have a couple of hundred pounds sitting around in a current account (I used to have substantially more than that until I overcame my natural laziness to actually put it somewhere more profitable) just in case of sudden spikes in their phone bill.

I am very cautious of allowing anyone to access one of my bank accounts without my say so for every transaction. It is my business how I pay a bill, not the business of a utility to rummage in my bank account and perhaps extract more than I was expecting and creating a chain reaction when I attempt to write cheques elsewhere without realising that they might be bounced or that I might incur charges for an unauthorised overdraft.

Axel

In message , Sharky writes

There's a fairly valid point behind that comment insofar as knowledge of household budgeting amongst those on lowest incomes and deepest in debt is usually quite low. Financial education is vital and I regularly need to talk to people struggling with money about the difference between "want" and "need". I recall one man, subject to a possession order on his house but steadfastly refusing to give up his Sky Television package in order to free up some money as he felt it was essential for the children. I was left trying to get the point across to him by expressing the hope that the owner of whichever shop doorway he and his children ended up living in would allow him to put his sky dish up there.

I've just cancelled my NTL account after they upped my line rental to £15 a month because I don't pay by DD. I won't pay bills that vary from month to month by DD because I never know exactly how much is needed to be left in the bank account. Add in the chance of someone adding a couple of zeros to the amount due to a typing error I reckon DD for phone bills are dangerous.

At 12:07:52 on 13/07/2006, AlanG delighted uk.legal by announcing:

That's why you're notified well in advance.

then your bank is obliged to immediately refund the amount in full.

Not with variable monthly bills.

Only if you can prove it was wrongly taken. A phone company claiming £100 instead of £25 would be in very strong position to argue the bill was correct even if it was wrong. The customer has no way of proving otherwise.

At 14:59:03 on 13/07/2006, AlanG delighted uk.finance by announcing:

Yes. In such cases you will receive a monthly statement in advance of the payment being taken.

Wrong! You do not have to prove any such thing.

The phone company is perfectly entitled to pursue you for the amount by other means but that is not under debate.

What do the card companies do with the CCA files submitted, then ?

Pshaw !

And when you complain you will be ignored.

Wanna bet? Been there. That's why I don't use DD or that bank anymore.

If only it was that simple.

At 20:44:42 on 14/07/2006, Peter Saxton delighted uk.legal by announcing:

Oh, it is. Like I said, I've never had any problems which weren't rectified with a very short phone call.

EDF Energy had spent two years providing letters for a company that had nothing to do with the real supply of electricity and then started making up a different supply address also. When I complained (it took them two years!) it would appear that the only solution they could come up with was to cancel the account and make a refund directly into a bank account and then print bills for a new account. They didn't send the bills because they wanted to send a letter with the bill but forgot to send the letter or the bills. They attempted to take the money out of a bank account that had very little money in it and 70 pounds bank charges were incurred. I complained and they said they would credit the account with the bank charges on the next bill. The next bill arrived with no credit so I decided to cancel the direct debits. EDF Energy are one of these companies that employs many undertrained and underintelligent call monkeys. One of them couldn't understand the concept of bank charges being charged by a bank and kept saying "we haven't charged your account"! They also would send letters saying they were going to merge the two accounts into one and then not doing it. When I called them to talk about the merging of the accounts they said they couldn't do it. Despite this, more letters continued to be received saying they were going to merge the accounts!

I have had other examples of EDF Energy Ltd. staff being unable to understand what their invoicing system does, ridiculous bills being altered and printed out for three years because three months of bills were at the wrong rate and then when queried nobody would be able to deal with it and people avoided returning calls and didn't put notes on the system.

Until large businesses can be run with a modicum of efficiency I will not trust DD's.

CCA's are set up without people being aware of the effect. They should be banned.