It seems BT have seen sense and have rescinded the £20 charge they sneaked into my bill without telling me.

From: Online Billing [mailto:ebilling@bt.com]
Sent: 01 March 2008 04:51
To: Daz
Subject: RE: Thank you for your email dated 28/2/08 regarding Bills and Payments. (KMM43421884I24871L0KM)

Dear Mr Jamieson,

Thank you for your e-mail dated 29/2/08 regarding the charges on your bill.

Please accept my apologies for the delay in replying to you and for any inconvenience this may have caused.

With response to your email, I am sorry to hear that you were not notified regarding the reconnection charges. However, I have gone ahead and refunded the reconnection charges of £20.00.

Further regarding the payment processing fee of £4.50, on May 1st 2007 we reduced the price of monthly line rental by £1.00 and broadband by £1.00 for customers who don’t pay by Direct Debit. At the same time, a separate payment processing fee of £1.50 a month was introduced. This is not a penalty charge but a separate fee for methods of payment which cost us more to process.

So the net effect is only 50p a month more for anyone who just has a phone line with us, but anyone who takes broadband as well will be 50p a month better off.

I would like to remind you that as part of your terms and conditions you are required to pay your bill in full when you receive it.

BT’s fee for non-Direct Debit payments is amongst the lowest around. For example, Virgin Media charge £5 a month. Many companies, such as Carphone Warehouse, will only accept customers who agree to pay by Direct Debit

The email then went into a massive sales pitch for the benefit of Direct Debits. I wasn’t interested. I replied with this.

Thank you for refunding the £20. When I see that displayed on my online bill I shall pay it.

Your assurances over the safety of Direct Debit however are false. I was debited twice in August and it took me over a month to get the money back. Any queries I have sent as a result of incorrect amounts have taken over a month to get a response, which has obviously resulted in a further Direct Debit.

My experience has shown that BT are unable to process Direct Debits without mistakes and are unable to rectify those mistakes promptly.

I will continue with my service and pay online as I have been doing, so long as the bill is correct.

Let me know when the correct bill is available for me to pay.

Oh yes, and as for your reminding me that I am required to pay my bill when I receive it as part of BT’s terms and conditions, I’ll remind you once again that I was lied to twice over the amounts I would be paying. I will also remind you that I have both of these calls recorded and I will remind you further that these calls are available for download on my website, so you can listen to them yourself if you like.

Regards
Darren Jamieson

So complaining about hidden charges does actually work? Everyone should remember that, don’t take hidden charges laying down. Stand up for your rights and speak out if you feel you’ve been treated unfairly.

Of course, having every correspondence broadcast on a high traffic website does help matters!

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BT responded to my complaint in record time, usually it takes them at least 4 weeks. However their response was less that thrilling

Dear Mr Jamieson

Thank you for your email dated 28/2/08 regarding Bills and Payments.

I am very sorry to hear of the difficulties you have experienced.

In response to your query, the rental charges are £96.98 Excl Vat every quarter and that is including line rental charges for BT Together Option and Broadband Service Charges. You have been charged £24.50 as Payment Charges in which £4.50 is for Payment Processing Fee and there has been a charge for £20.00 which is charged for Reconnection Charges. The last quarter payment was made after the due date and you had your outgoing calls restricted for which BT has charged you a reconnection. For the whole outstanding amount, there is a VAT charged for £18.37.

Hence you have an outstanding balance of £127.81.

With all the difficulties you have faced with respect to your Direct Debit and paying a fee for reconnection, I would strongly suggest you to set in up a Direct Debit Monthly wherein we send our customers the monthly telephone bills and directly debit their bank account for whole of the bill amount. The required bill payments are claimed 7 calendar days after bill production. Monthly Billing is now only available to customers with Direct Debit Monthly.

Should you have any further queries do not hesitate to contact us again.

Obviously that’s not acceptable and has represented the final straw. I replied with this:

Let me get this straight, you’ve charged me £24.50 in payment charges, £4.50 payment processing fee and £20 for reconnection?

None of this was actually explained to me and I wasn’t notified of any of it. I wasn’t disconnected as my Internet worked uninterrupted throughout the last few months. My last bill was paid late because of your error with the bill in the first place and your taking several weeks to respond to every query… all of which is documented by me.

You have hit me with hidden charges and not even notified me of such. That is not on my friend. You expect me to set up a direct debit? So you can take money from account without even telling me what it’s for, without any notice? Do you think I’m stupid???

I will not be paying any payment charges, processing fees or reconnection fees.

You either rescind those charges so that I can pay for the service I am getting or you can consider this my written notice of cancellation.

I will not be held to ransom by you like this.

If you think you can take me to court for the money I remind you that I record all of my phone calls and keep all of my correspondence, which means I have the original phone calls with your salesman and the customer service reps who both lied to me about the direct debit charges. This is all displayed on my website www.mrdaz.com for download. I will gladly produce this as evidence and for the Trading Standards Authority.

So you have two choice, rescind the hidden charges you have unlawfully added to my account or cancel my service and we can call this a day. I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with BT since the day I joined you and would gladly be shot of your lying, deceitful company.

Again I look forward to your reply.

If I don’t get a satisfactory reply I’ll just sack BT off and go to Vodafone. I could use one of their packs then on my laptop wherever I am. I never use the landline for BT anyway so I’m wasting money having the line rental.

I think this could be it for me and BT.

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I just received an email from BT insisting that I pay my bill or face a £7 charge for late payment. Not one to back down from these kind of threats I responded with kind.

My bill is once again inaccurate. This seems to happen with every bill, so there’s no great surprise there.

I pay £11 per month for line rental and £21.99 per month for broadband. I have no other services. This totals £98.97 per quarter, not £127.81.

You were close, but no cigar.

Please provide me with the correct total for my bill so that I can pay it. I refuse to pay for your mistakes once again.

I cancelled my direct debit with you imbeciles after you took £136 out of my account for one month’s services, when it should have been £33. If I had even the slightest confidence that you could work out the correct total for my bill I would use direct debit again.

I don’t.

I look forward to your reply.

Let’s see if they come back with anything approaching an intelligent response.

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