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weedom

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  1. I got a "Final Response", eventually, giving me a definitive bunch of figures, and referring any further complaints to the ombudsman. I've then done a credit check upon myself - and my credit check says I've missed lots of payments. Funny, that, because they've just acknowledged that I haven't. Another email to Sir/Mr. Blank, asking him to get his staff to remove the bad stuff they've said about me on the credit history report. I got another "Final Response" (I've had quite a few of them now) saying "No, we believe the record to be accurate, so we're amending nothing". So I'm preparing to put a case to the Ombudsman showing incompetence and pressing to have my credit report examined with a fine-tooth comb, and any discrepancies corrected. Sorry for the lack of detail in this post - normal service will resume shortly.
  2. I've received a "Charge for Payment of Money" of £300-ish from a company called Scott & Company. It seems to be for Housing Benefit which was incorrectly paid to me in 2006 (I think). The letter appears to have been hand delivered to an address I was, until recently, resident at. I moved into a new residence on 18th October, but the letter was delivered on 22nd October. Can I claim ignorance? Or am I best to address this by contacting the County Council in question? I also have no idea what this relates to, really. I do remember them granting me housing benefit, but I thought it had been reclaimed through increased CT, which I have just finished paying back arrears on. Any help gratefully appreciated. Oh - and if you want/need specifics, please PM me. I don't want the DCC identifiying me by info on this site WeeDom
  3. hurrah! Another update. After my last email to Mr. Blank, I received an email (sadly lost after a computer hiccup) from a Debra Stevens from Customer Service Recovery, saying she was looking into my complaint at the behest of Sir Blank. Having spoken to the sensible Collections guy, and having heard nothing further from her, I assumed a line had been drawn under the affair. But no! Debbie (we appear to be friends, now, since that is how she has signed her letter) tells me that she has "refunded" the charges. But my new friend has given me completely different numbers to those which Praveen provided. Here comes the email goodness: ==================================================== Dear Sir Blank, Your organisation continues to baffle me. I recently wrote to you to tell you about Praveesh and how he had amended the following charges (extortions, as they should properly be termed) from my bank accounts: sort code 873448 ****1768 - £440 extortion removed, leaving a balance of ~ £360 debit **** 4868 - £460 extortion removed, balance remaining ~ £419 debit I have since received a letter from: Debbie Stevens, Senior Office Lloyds TSB Credit Operations Customer Service Recovery - Brighton She tells me that "As we have no wish to add to your finanacial difficulties" as has "refunded" charges of £415 on account ending 4868, and £215 onaccount ending 1768. Now, it seems obvious to me and the rest of the country that Lloyds TSB, and it's shareholders, have a vested interest in increasing my financial difficulties by charging excessively for minor administrative affairs. I also have a big issue with the word "refunded" in this context - this is not a refund. At best, this is a correction of a mistake. At worst, this was an attempt to extort money from me. You and I both know that these charges would still stand on my account had I not got fed up with the whole process and gone straight to the top of the chain. Anyway, what I need now is a definitive answer. What is the state of my accounts? What charges have been applied? Removed? What is the balance now? Your staff seem incapable of producing the same answer twice which, as the commander in chief of a financial institution of Lloyds TSB's standing, should be very worrying to you indeed. ========================================= I have an idea, by the way,of how to drive customers to deposit money with you in their hundreds of thousands. I don't know why nobody has thought of it until now! Drop your excessive "Excess Overdraft" charges to something like £10, and advertise it heavily. This would still be overcharging for the "service", so your profits would be guaranteed and customers from the other banks would flock to LloydsTSB. The good-will you would be the beneficiary of would be enormous because, obviously, you'd be precipitating a free-fall in bank charges and, happily, saving yourself a LOT of money spent on lawyers to defend what is obviously a sharp and unlawful practice. Go on! Do it! Precipitate the change, and win the market! Yours sincerely WeeDom
  4. Dear Sir Blank, Finally, some good news. A couple of shining beacons in the darkness of desolation that is my experience of customer services within LloydsTSB. Here are the notes I took - 1710 - called and spoke to Shamita from the not-Brighton Collections centre. She informed me that the charges are now £630 since March, wich could have been £830 had her colleague not refunded £200 to me in June. I explained that the reason for the refund was because that advisor had noted that I had stuck to the agreed repayment plan. I asked her to transfer me to a supervisor, as should have happened on Tuesday 15th July. 1715 - placed hold 1724 - still on hold 1725 - began making beds - not easy with a phone clamped to your ear 1732 - Shamita returned and promised me a callback from a supervisor with three minutes. I asked her if she knew the name "Victor Blank". Not a clue, so I explained to her who you are (surely part of the induction to working at LloydsTSB??) and that I'm emailing you with the progress of this complaint. I also asked her if she was from Brighton, as the number I have called say "Collections Centre, Brighton, BN1 4BE 0845 6006380" - false advertising, surely. 1734 - received call from Praveesh. what a star. All charges refunded (although I have an issue with the word "refunded" in this context - you can't refund what was never given). 1740 - spoke to Praveesh's manager and extolled Praveesh's, and Shamita's, virtues as the only people in this sorry mess who have shown any common sense whatsoever. ======================================= so to the scores - LloydsTSB common sense league with common sense 2 - ~10 lacking common sense. Yours sincerely WeeDom PS: Thank you for your keen interest in following this case up and assisting a valued customer. ========================================= Sorry folks, that appears to be the end of the comedy gold on this particular occasion. I'm sure there will be more to follow at some point. Cheers WeeDom PS: the "phone clamped to the ear" bit is obviously artistic license - this is the 21st century, and I do have hands-free
  5. isn't there a cooling off period? If it's PPE, all you need to do is find some fault, however petty, and say it's not actually fit for purpose. Under-arm ventilation flaps not as large as you'd expected, or the pockets don't hold enough thing-a-bobs, or something. Don't mention the change in price, though, or they'll twig straight away what you're up to
  6. Unless you've damaged it, take it back and say you don't want it anymore. They'll have to refund the price you paid unless, as I said, you've damaged it in some way. Wait until the money goes back in, then go and buy it at the cheaper price. Before I get flamed, I don't think that's illegal at all. Immoral, perhaps
  7. Well, they left me alone for a bit, and I've been happily (vaguely) paying £70 a month for the past 9 months or so to service debts built up by their charges while I wait despondently for the court case(s) to be resolved. But now - battle resumes!!! yay! The situation with my accounts as of sept 2007: * current account 1 had a debit balance of approx £400. Agreed repayment plan of £7.20 per month * current account 2 had a debit balance of approx £350. Agreed repayment plan of £12.80 per month * loan account, taken out to repay charges, had a debit balance of approx £1500. Agreed repayment of £49.50 per month. Current state of affairs: * current account 1 has a debit balance exceeding £800. eh??? all other accounts are fine. This is going to get complicated,so I'll diarise it a bit. * January 2008 - moved 300 miles to take up a new job * Later in January 2008 - called LloydsTSB to inform them of home move * May 2008 - received rather stroppy letter from Collections Centre, Brighton (sent to my new address - this is important) stating that they want the £800 NOW. * May 2008 - I called and asked what was going on. I was informed that I hadn't kept up my repayment plan. I said I had, the girl on the phone said "oops,yeah, so you have. Sorry about that. I'll sort it out" * yesterday (15/07) received rather stroppy phone call at 8pm from Collections Centre Advisor, from somewhere not Brighton, advising me that I had recently had £215 of charges placed on the no.1 account.When I asked to speak to a supervisor, he refused to grant that request, saying that he only made outgoing calls. I suggested he get off his seat and get a supervisor on to his phone, but he insisted the only way I could complain was to write a letter to Head Office * Today: called Customer Services and spoke to Tasha who informed me that there were actually in excess of £400 worth of charges on the account. When I asked to speak to her supervisor, she gladly acquiesced, and the suprvisor told me the account had been over it's limit since September 2007. * I asked why this had happened, and she explained that a charge had come off at that time and, since I was only paying £7.20pm, I'd incurred charges every month. This, as it happens, doesn't make sense because their new charges are £15 fee + £15per day for 10 days - £165 per month, so if her story is correct I'm actually due over £1500 of charges. * I asked why I hadn't had a letter, and she explained that LloydsTSB only have my old address. How, then, did she explain the fact that I'd had a letter from Collections Center to my new address - "erm", I think, was her reply. * So - to this evening. I called Collections Centre, Brighton, and got through to Collections Centre somewhere not Brighton. They said that they have the old address and, when challenged as to how they were able to magically know my new address replied with "erm". I decided that "erm" wasn't really doing it for me, and asked to speak to a supervisor. I was promised a call immediately a supervisor was available. (breathe) I'm still waiting now so, to alleviate the boredom, I have composed and sent the following email to Mr. Vince Blank, someone apparently quite high up in LloydsTSB: (I've mis-spelt his name. oops!) (btw,this is actually a follow-up to a mail I sent earlier from work in roughly the same vane) Dear Mr. Blank, This evening I called your collections department, allegedly in Brighton. An Asian voice answered the phone, after some fumbling about with her headset. Again, after a fruitless 20 minutes trying to explain my problem, I asked to be transferred to a supervisor. The agent asked me if it was OK for me to be put on hold again. I said no, that was not OK - I'd already been on hold for lengthy I wanted to hear her conversation with her supervisor - at which point I was promptly put on hold. Some time later, the agent came back on the line and informed me that all her supervisors were busy, but she would arrange for a call-back. It's now 1900, some two hours after the request, and I've still not had a response. Much though I loathe to bug the life out of you, I have zero faith in the staff I have so far come across to sort this problem out,and so I turn to you for a degree of common sense - to summarise (and add a little more detail to my previous email) My phone call this evening - I informed the agent that if I had been notified that my account was over the overdraft limit, I could have taken remedial action. She told me that Collections had not been informed of a change of address, and that I would have to go to my branch (a 300 mile journey). When I spoke to a customer services advisor earlier, she told me the branch would not be able to deal with a change-of-address, since the account is with Collections. This is a dichotomy - it can't possibly be both. Surely a change of address process cannot be all that difficult for LloydsTSB to master. Furthermore, in my possession, I have a letter sent from Collections to my current address - so where is this difficulty arising? Someone has the correct address, and it appears to be Collections. How can they have the wrong address and the correct one? If they're able to send me a "Collection Alert", why were they unable to send me a letter several months ago informing me my account was getting into arrears? Furthermore, again, they have my telephone number(s) - why have I not received a phone call, then, if I did not respond to the letters? Not much of a summary - but I'll persevere, if you will. Just last month I received this "Collection Alert" letter from your Collections Centre, signed by "(unintelligble squiggle), Manager, Collections Centre". Upon receipt of this I called and, happily, spoke to one of the people in Brighton. She informed me that there had been a mistake,they could quite clearly see that I had kept up the agreed payments and that she would put a note on the system that no further action be taken. At no point was there any mention, as there has been now, that my account had been overdrawn for some months. Yet the call centre in Asia seems to have a completely different story. Again I have to ask - what is going on within your organisation? This is a debacle, Mr. Blank. If I do not hear from you by the end of this week, confirming that the latest charges have been refunded in their entirety, that no further charges will be applied and that interest has been frozen on all charges-related debt I currently have with LloydsTSB, I will have no hesitation in taking further action, be that with a solicitor or by contacting the media to highlight the, quite frankly, hilarious incompetence which has so far been displayed. Honestly,it's like the Keystone Cops got sacked and went into Customer Services. Yours sincerely Dominic Pain PS: I fully intend to continue my telephone correspondence with Collections Centre, Brighton (and not Brighton) and I'll keep you up-to-date with every twist and turn. ====================================================== I'll keep you all posted too, of course [EDIT] Try [email protected] - I've not had a delivery failure, so presumably the emails are reaching his inbox.
  8. I've just come back to this forum after being untroubled by the Collections Centre for a while. They've raised their despotic heads again, so now I'm active here again,for a while. Selfish, I know, but hopefully I'll raise a few grins and, with luck,a few good points. First off, I deeply resent the implication that I am "racist". I'm not going to try to back that up with examples of how not-racist I am. Just accept it,or call me a liar to my face. The biggest single problem is language barriers/difficulties - day in, day out, foreign advisors deal with people who they cannot understand due to language difficulties (Geordie? Aberdonian?) and this is bound to fuel frustration on their part. I have dealt with customers, in my last job, who have been through the "Asian Helpdesk" experience, and I have felt deep frustration coming from both ends of the telephone line. The Asian helpdesk can't understand the (broken? certainly dialectal) English of customers, and the customer can't understand the broken English of the advisor. No-one, from a customer service point of view or from the employees point of view, is helped by this. Importantly, empathy is intrinsically hampered. When I was working in a call center for a UK telco, dealing with UK people, I could put myself in their shoes. Little old lady unable to pay her bill - yeah, I could see the worry, the mottled carpet, the pension stretched. Young single mother calling from a call box cos her line wasn't working - yeah, I could see where she was coming from, I could understand why she was fearful of being isolated without a landline. I could, quite literally, put myself in their shoes because I had met "them" at some stage in my life. The exact same problem applies to teenage school-leaver employees in UK call centres, in my experience. They can't empathise effectively, as they simply haven't been in enough situations to be able to. This is an important point - I would use the same disparaging tone if I was consistently required to deal with 17 year-old Collection Centre employees of LloydsTSB whose only point of escalation was another empathetically challenged 17 year old. To summarise - the mention of the word "Asian" was meant to imply that the conversation was off to a bad start,and the advisor and I both knew it. I've had nothing but rudeness and incompetence (bred by language barriers and empathetic barriers) when dealing with the Collections Centre abroad, and nothing but courtesy and assistance when dealing with UK folks - be they of Asian descent or not. It's about empathy - and the Asian call centre staff, to a person, have displayed absolutely none. This is not racist - simply a matter of bald, uncomfortable truth. Cheers WeeDom (grrr... don't call me racist!!!)
  9. http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/ - column on the right reads: Total Returned: £8,457,272,978 to 9571 people. (my commas, for clarity) You're looking at http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/ - the top line there reads as you've quoted. Cheers WeeDom
  10. bugger... I definitely missed a trick, there!!! WeeDom
  11. According to the front page, £8,457,270,478 has been reclaimed by 9563 people. By my calculator, that's an average of £844,374 per person. Seems rather a lot, don't you think? At my rate of being charged (£4k over 4 years), I'd need to have been charged for 200 years to reach that amount. Is it,perhaps, a sign of an aging population? Cheers WeeDom
  12. I've got a claim currently in progress. I know I'm not probably not going to get the answer I'm looking for, but... They badgered me enough when I was in debt with them. I'm now in debt again (due entirely to bank charges) and they're at me like a pack of animals for £140. Well, I want answers and I'm going to keep badgering until I get a proper response from someone.
  13. Sorry for the extended delay in updating this. 25th May I received a letter from LloydsTSB. I shan't mention the advisors name, as that's unfair on him. None of this is his fault. The most important paragraph are these (any spelling mistakes are mine,not his): Whilst I can appreciate that you feel the charge of £35 is excessive, I am sure you can appreciate that there is a large amount of work involved in maintaining accounts that go overdrawn and those that have items returned. We have to employ large numbers of staff to deal with all aspects of this administration, therefore, we ask those who overdraw, or who do not have sufficient funds in their account as and when their payments become due, to make a contribution towards these. Obviously when faced with an unpaid item the retailer (in this instance BT) will have internal costs of their own to cover. This is a matter between you and them and one that we are unable to comment upon. then some blah followed by: If I have not heard from you by 20 July I will close my file, although I will re-open it if you come back at any point afterwards. =================================== I sent a further email on 7th July: Your ref: BHAM/PB/CC/964782 You haven't answered my actual questions. All you have done is laid out your charging policy. I note, with interest, that you didn't lay out a "tarriff for services", but a "charging policy". Your manager told me that you incur the full costs of running the Direct Debit scheme. How can this be the case, when BT also have costs? You have not addressed this in the slightest. Secondly, how can it possibly cost £85 to not pay my bill of £45? You use the phrase "make a contribution towards " the cost of staff employed to maintain overdrawn accounts. What proportion am I contributing towards these costs? This month alone you have taken £200 from my bank account, more than a weeks wages for me. Is an entire person actually dedicated to looking after my account for 1 week per month? If so, I'd like to meet that person, if possible. I appear to be paying a good proportion of their monthly income, I think it is only right that I know who I am paying, and what they do for me. If there is no such person, and in fact my account is on of many processed by a computer (perhaps with an operator who processes 100s of accounts per day) then I would like you to justify exactly what I am paying for. It is my belief that you are vastly overcharging me for any "service" you have provided. It is also my belief that, without such high charges, I would not be in such financial trouble at this present moment in time. It certainly does not cost LloydsTSB £35 to process an unpaid Direct Debit. If I am contributing towards the costs incurred by LloydsTSB by other customers, such as bad debtors, then this is illegal and unjust. Why should I, and others like me, pay off other peoples debts to LloydsTSB? Please, when you finally get round to answering my questions, can you address the actual questions: 1. Who incurs the cost of the Direct Debit Scheme 2. How do you come to a cost of £70 to _not_ pay my BT bill 3. What proportion of your costs am I actually "contributing"? These are very simple questions. Please answer them in a simple manner, again, by letter and not by email. Yours sincerely Dominic Pain =================================== I haven't heard anything further, not even a confirmation.
  14. I'm waiting for their answer, first. I don't want to shout this around the trad press until they've played their hand. And it's two weeks they've said, now, not 28 days. It's £80 quid they've charged, between the two of them. And my bill still isn't paid! How can it possibly cost them £80 to not pay a £45 bill??? All in all, it's cost me £125 to pay my £45 telephone bill. Unbelievable! Cheers WeeDom
  15. Update: I received another letter today telling me they would address my query within 28 days. That's three months to answer a simple question.
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