This topic was closed on 03/07/19. If you have a problem which is similar to the issues raised in this topic, then please start a new thread and you will get help and support there. If you would like to post up some information which is relevant to this particular topic then please flag the issue up to the site team and the thread will be reopened. - Consumer Action Group

Here are the Licensing details for this company from the SIA website: License number: 0230001191680604 License Holder: GARETH EVANS License Function: Vehicle Immobilisation Capacity: Frontline License Expires: 03/03/2009 License Status: Active License issued: 03/03/2008 Gareth Evans has also held three other licenses which have run their duration.

Quite honestly I doubt they would too, although it would depend on how both parties dealt with the police. They COULD, if they wanted to, but knowing the paperwork that would generate I doubt they would want to unless he became abusive to them, in which case they could quite easily use that as a harsher reason than public order. Doubt the CPS would touch it with the preverbial barge pole though. The MOST likely outcome would be they would tell him to remove the clamp or check more effectively next time, and that would mean bad mojo between the old bill and the clamping firm, which he could do without - which is why I believe he complied, albeit reluctantly.

Personally I would write to them along the lines of the following: * They hold your car, you no longer want it because it's unviable to repair. * You contend you owe them nothing, they contend you owe them a release fee * You therefore agree, without admission or prejudice, that they may keep the car in lieu of any payment they believe they are owed * You state quite firmly that due to your generous offer which you have made in the spirit of compromise you now consider the matter closed and will not respond to any further correspondence. A court looking at this would HAVE to consider that you made suitable efforts to remove the vehicle, and would have to consider that evidence that the garage-appointed tow truck could not get to the vehicle. If you tell the company that you agree they can take the car, then what they do with it then becomes their issue, especially if you were (keep photocopies) to send the vehicle license document section to them that is filled in when sold to a trader and send the other section off right away to DVLA. To be really sneaky, send them their part a few days AFTER you send DVLA their part. A court would have to consider where ownership lay at the time of removal. If you had already given the car to them, and sent the registration documents to DVLA as proof, then they cannot hold you liable for the removal costs for the car as it belongs to them, not you.

I would think that such an event would, legally, be regarded as carjacking. My reasoning for this is: 1) A bailiff or even a court official has NO legal entitlement to require a vehicle on a public highway yield for them. Only a police officer, and under certain circumstances a DVLA road marshal has that legal power. 2) Any attempt to commandeer a vehicle in the way you have described by a person NOT described under (1) above is regarded as seizing the vehicle illegally. A vehicle is an item of personal property, not a residence; right of entry applies to a residence only. What you probably will find is that the bailiff will claim that they have already claimed the car on a previous visit, but the onus will be on them to prove that they correctly notified you of that fact - they can't just steal the vehicle off you in this way on the public highway. Should anything like that happen, make a note of the bailiff's vehicle details, should there be more than one of them, or a description of a bailiff who is on your own. Do NOT resist or fight the bailiff, as this could get you into trouble, but IMMEDIATELY call 999, give the police your vehicle details and the direction the vehicle was last headed in - don't mention bailiffs at this point, just tell them your vehicle has been carjacked (a category 1 response) and let the bailiff enjoy a day in the cells while the police sort the mess out. Remember, that someone who just says "I'm a bailiff" doesn't show any evidence of that, and until you're sure they are a bailiff, collecting on a debt you actually acknowledge exists, if they take your property you have reasonable grounds to suspect a criminal offense (theft at the very least, sometimes theft with the threat of violence and occasionally theft with violence) has occurred.

Reign in the language, asterisked out or not. Treat others how you want to be treated yourself. The first thing you have to do is to get proof from them of what they say the debt is. Give them notice that they are to provide proof that there was actually a debt, which you will study and decide whether or not to challenge. Give them 30 days to comply with that instruction. One of two things will happen. Either they will provide what they say is evidence of a debt, in which case you will have grounds to challenge that if you believe there was never any such outstanding debt, or they will fail to respond, in which case you have grounds to challenge them registering a default against you for a debt they cannot (or have not within a fair amount of time) justify exists. In either case, you then have a definate course of action you can take, either when time is up or when you receive their response. Good luck. Please don't abuse the site helpers, they are only trying to clarify things in their own minds before they post advise, they are not taking sides for or against you and certainly don't deserve sarcastic insults.

I fail to see why. You mentioned two points in your original posting. 1) If you pay a cheque in, the next day it can be drawn on (with certain accounts) - an explanation has been provided for the context of this. 2) You can overdraw by £50 at any time - again, this is only certain accounts, and again it's a "buffer zone" the bank provides, which yes it does charge for because it's only supposed to be a kind of "crisis loan" If you can post a proper reason why this thread's questions have not been satisfactorily answered, or why the answers can't be found in the small print of your account details, by all means post them, but if you just post something like this then that is trolling, and I will close the thread. The forums are for serious discussion, not trolling. If you have other questions, ask them, but we addressed the original question, and showed that it was not a con. To try and keep the thread going with meaningless one liners IS trolling, and can lead to your ability on the forums to be restricted or withdrawn. Please respect other members by posting constructively, and remember, you're a guest here - don't abuse that priviledge, or it may be withdrawn.

Precisely. The bank is absolving itself of the responsibility. If you choose to draw against an uncleared cheque, then it's your risk. If the cheque subsequently bounces, you will incur charges. This is very likely to be in the small print, someplace. It might be a little confusing to keep track of, if you have a lot of cheque activity, but it's not a con.

Firstly, can I ask you NOT to post entirely in capital letters. In internet forums, that's regarded as shouting, and also regarded as somewhat rude. Many times, people who do that are regarded as "trolls", i.e. users who post rubbish just to be seen, or underage teens who don't yet know where the caps lock key is and are too "leet" to find it. Wouldn't want anyone putting you into either category, would we? Okay, to address your comments. Plain and simply, it's a grey area, which would most likely be addressed in the small print regarding your account. Get out a magnifying glass and read up. In Ontario, Canada, when you deposit a cheque the bank (and I'm talking about TD Canada Trust here; other banks might have different policies) allows you to draw up to 40% of it immediately. The rest of the balance is available after two to three days, which is the average cheque clearance time in Canada. Should the cheque "bounce" charges are applied, but at a fairer rate than in the UK. The small print to a TD Canada Trust account calls uncleared cheques "an advance on the promisary note" and states clearly that drawing against an uncleared cheque is a risk the account holder takes, since the bank cannot be responsible for keeping a customers promise, which I think is fair enough. In other words, if you don't trust that the cheque will be honoured, but you draw against it anyway, you accept the inherent risk that if it bounces you will incur charges. So no, I doubt that it is a particular trick by the bank to make money, but your best place to confirm this is to read the small print - all of it - to your particular account and see if that specific item is addressed there. Happy hunting!

Can I just say, with reference to the original posting, which talked about software to copy DVDs, a little point about that. Region 0 DVDs - that is, ones authored by home PCs, have no Content Scrambling System (CSS) and can be copied by virtually anything; Nero Burning Rom is a classic example. Now, professionally authored DVDs, which are region limited, protect their content with CSS to prevent Piracy. Nero will tell you with an onscreen dialogue box "Sorry this is copyright protected - I ain't copying it" that it's found CSS and will terminate at that point. Other, less well written software, may simply report a sense error and stop, or worse crash altogether. This doesn't mean the software is faulty. Copying DVDs is not illegal. Decrypting CSS however IS illegal, and since you would have to decrypt the CSS on a professionally authored DVD in order to be able to copy it, this is where the offense lies when one copies a professionally produced DVD. For this reason, some of the cheaper copying software which doesn't ship with CSS won't understand CSS protected disks, and may crash. Again, not because of a fault, because the CSS is doing what it is intended to do - stopping the copying of intellect-copyrighted material. If the software you bought is purely for copying DVDs you have authored (i.e. it doesn't come with CSS decryption software) and you try to use it on a CD someone else has authored which DOES use CSS, then the software is fit for purpose specifically if it WON'T copy the disk. You can't return it as unfit for this reason. You would most likely have to justify what disk you couldn't copy before you could satisfy the shop that the product was faulty. As a side note it should be observed that an author of a De-CSS program was unsuccessfully prosecuted, but use of his program to circumvent legitimate copyright protection remains a criminal offense, even if combined with a copying program unrelated to it.

The first thing to do is clear your cache. It might be that a "cookie" (a piece of information that should only be temporarily installed on your computer) relating to the login is incorrect. For internet explorer users, go to the TOOLS menu, select INTERNET OPTIONS, and press the two buttons in the middle of the dialogue box that say "delete cookies" and "delete files". If you use Mozilla Firefox, go to the TOOLS menu, select OPTIONS, select PRIVACY and under the private data heading select CLEAR NOW. This should resolve the problem.

Not that I'm aware of, but I could be wrong. Although the time is past and you now stand little chance of getting a refund, you could at the time have threatened to call the police, and to demand that the till be "cashed up" to see if it was £10 over (which would prove you had given £20 and been given correct change for £10) however, doing so wouldn't have endeared you to the police or to the club, and would most likely have earned you a ban from the premises. It's also likely the police wouldn't have given it priority and you'd have waited several hours for an officer to attend. Nothing is to stop you writing to the proprietor and complaining, however, and if you get a rude reply to that, consider sending it and your original (not rude) letter to the local newspaper. You'll probably get some form of satisfaction. Good luck.

Personally I would cc a letter both to your bank and to Tiscali, instructing your bank not to make further payments to Tiscali since they have not fulfilled the original contract. They cannot hold you to a contract they don't deliver on, and if they haven't successfully delivered an upgraded service they have breached their own contract. The key here is to be proactive; address the main copy of the letter to your bank, and the carbon copy to Tiscali. If they protest about it, then you can get heavier by warning them that you had already told them they hadn't provided, and also if they claim the money off your bank (and the bank pays, which some might) you can demand a refund off your bank. From what you're saying, it's a pretty open and shut case. They promised 1Mb, and failed to deliver a consistant 1Mb. They promised 2Mb and failed to deliver at all. They are in breach of a contract to supply a service, so the contract does not hold you to a minimum term. They will probably send you to a debt collector, many companies do even though they know they'll never stand a cat in hell's chance of being granted the money if it goes to court. Stick by your guns, tell them you're cancelling because they can't or haven't provided, tell your bank not to pay and regard the case as closed.

Let's try another definition here: steal • verb (past stole; past part. stolen) 1 take (something) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it. 2 give or take surreptitiously or without permission: I stole a look at my watch. 3 move somewhere quietly or surreptitiously. 4 (in various sports) gain (a point, advantage, etc.) unexpectedly or by exploiting the temporary distraction of an opponent. • noun 1 informal a bargain. 2 chiefly N. Amer. an act of stealing. Now, here we have the problem. The government haven't stolen the vehicle, they are holding it pending the payment of a debt (in this case the fine for being the keeper of an unlicensed vehicle left on a public highway) - there is no intention to keep the vehicle should the payment of the debt and any costs resultant thereof be paid. Therefore, there is no act of theft. The intention NOT to return it must be provable for theft, and the registered keeper has already been informed that the vehicle will be returned upon payment of all outstanding fees. Fair? you could dispute. Theft? No. Theft would be telling the registered keeper that they would keep the vehicle whatever happened. If the registered keeper MAKES THE CHOICE not to pay, that's their choice, under which circumstances the government will keep the vehicle in lieu of the outstanding debt, but that is a choice the registered keeper makes, not the government. You can't accuse someone of theft if they give you a choice and you decide ultimately not to take one option. Theft is denial of access to your property indefinately, with no choices. It could further be argued that you chose to risk parking there despite numerous TV and press advertisements, and also that you did so fully in the knowledge the vehicle was untaxed (evidenced by the expired disk) - DVLA inform people to renew as a courtesy, not a requirement. The disk itself states quite clearly its expiry date, and if you don't renew, you're untaxed and committing an offense. You can't even claim ignorance, since the date is clearly shown on the disk, so claiming not to have received a reminder is irrelevant. The disk itself told you to renew, you didn't, therefore you committed an offense and took the risks associated with committing the offense. On this occasion you lost, and they impounded the car. That's unfortunate, but it's not theft.

Each time you "top up" your prepayment card with credit, the server that issues the credit can store extra information on your card, including the instruction to change the charge per unit. However, the information about current charge per unit can be obtained by cycling through the options using the two buttons on the meter. I think it would be worth while making a note of these values, and if Powergen change them dramatically you can query the reason for the change with them. On occasion I've had a situation where they raise the unit cost to defer a debt on the property, and they don't always notify the current billpayer; this could well be what's happened here. If in doubt, get a new owners card from them which will reset the meter.