Well here is the final part of my tale: I finally managed to get my wrongly-delivered Dabs product collected from me on Friday 13th February and the following Monday (16th) I received a notification of refund/credit by e-mail. On Thursday 19th, my money finally arrived back in my bank account - a full month after I originally placed the order for the hard drive. I have just checked the Dabs website today and guess what? That same hard drive is still apparently available with "more than 50 in stock". Not good enough. I just don't know why they wasted so much of my time when it seems they never intended to sell me the hard drive. Lesson learned.

I can confirm that Maven1975's experience of waiting days for a response is not unique as I am currently having the same problems with Dabs.com and I will definitely not be using them again. They have completely wasted 3 weeks (so far) of my time and I suspect that they knew right from the start that they weren't able to deliver the correct product to me. I wanted to buy a replacement hard drive for my Humax PVR and I identified the item I wanted to purchase on their website. The first problem was trying to sort out issues with getting the website to automatically deduct VAT from the price because I live in the Channel Islands. There was a page on their website saying that once the customer entered their postcode, it would automatically recognise the location and deduct VAT from the price. However, it did not. Hence my first enquiry to them (on 16 Jan 15) was to get this sorted out before I could place my order. Alarm bells should have rung with me when it took them 3 days to respond (19 Jan 15). I was then assured that if I logged back in and placed the order, the VAT would be deducted. Sure enough it was and I placed my order. On 21 January 2015, I received confirmation by e-mail that the product had been despatched. However, more alarm bells began to ring when I noticed that the delivery charge on the invoice was only 82 pence to deliver a hard drive to the Channel islands! It would appear that they had undercharged me for the delivery in error, although they have never acknowledged this. On Monday 26 January 2015, a package arrived by ordinary letter post, just dropped through the door with the other mail onto the carpet below. It was not the hard drive I had ordered, but something completely different- a pack of 2 DDR3 memory sticks (RAM) for a computer, although it had a label on the back containing the description of the hard drive that had not been delivered to me. I e-mailed them the same day (26 Jan 15) to notify them that the wrong item had been delivered to me in error. I also informed them of the apparent delivery price undercharge and offered to pay any extra as I was concerned that at a later stage they might try to send the hard drive to me by ordinary letter post and it would get damaged on arrival. Three days later they finally replied, attaching a copy of their Enquiry Information form, which they wanted me to complete and return. I e-mailed this back to them late on Saturday (31 Jan 15). I then had to wait until the early afternoon of Tuesday (03 Feb 15) before they responded. Instead of just arranging for me to send the product back, they now required me to take photos of the wrongly-delivered item and forward these photos to them. Remember that I wasn't claiming that the product was damaged- only that it was the wrong product. Just two hours after receiving this request (3.50pm, 03 Feb 15), I e-mailed them two photos of the item they had sent me. Today (Sat 07 Feb 15), I finally received an e-mail from them informing me of the following: Just to clarify that I did not request a refund- I was still hoping that they could, after all this time, deliver the correct item to me that I ordered. So I have sent them another e-mail today, threatening to contact their local Trading Standards office. I have told them that they should arrange the collection of the item 'as soon as possible' and that they should NOT wait the best part of a week again before replying to me. I am now wondering how long it will be before the product is collected and then how long after this before I finally receive a refund into my bank account....

Thanks for this opinion. I guess I was thinking that a potential PPI payout might not be able to be offfset against other outstanding debts. Any other views on this are welcome.

My sister, who was a spendthrift, died two years ago, after many years of illness, in which her chronic smoking, obesity and diabetes must have been major contributory factors. She had been virtually housebound for several years before her death. She lived alone and died penniless, apparently owing about £10,000 in credit card debt. My elderly mother contacted the credit card company at the time to inform them of her death, but kept none of the correspondence nor any of my sister's credit card statements, so the very little information that I have mainly came from a series of texts I exchanged with my sister about a year before she died. From these texts, it appears that my sister took out PPI many years ago, possibly when she was still working (a rare event in her later years). Some years later when she was arguably no longer capable of working, she suffered a heart attack. It seems that my sister then received a PPI payout, which cleared her (then) £2,000 credit card debt. However, she must have then continued paying PPI premiums after her heart attack until, one year before her death, she admitted to me that she had racked up credit card debt of about £10,000 and was still paying PPI each month, even though she said that she had more or less been led to believe that she wouldn't ever get any further PPI payouts. She told me that she really ought to stop paying the PPI. She said: "I must cancel it [the PPI] but I can't remember how." At that time, all I could do was encourage my sister to contact the CAB. We don't know if she ever bothered to do so before she died, nor whether she cancelled the PPI. What are the chances that my sister would have been due compensation and, if so, from what point in time might this compensation be deemed to start from? I presume that if she received a PPI payout payout after her heart attack, then we could not claim compensation for any premiums paid prior to that payout. However, her health after the heart attack probably made it very unlikely that she would ever have been able to work again and I'm fairly certain that in fact she never did work again, as she was permanently relying on invalidity benefit. A year before she died, she had clearly realised that she was paying PPI for no reason. I have to presume that my sister probably never volunteered any new information at any point about her worsening health and her reliance on invalidity benefit and I presume that the company to whom she was paying PPI probably never asked. Is there a possible case for compensation here? If so, would it be worth claiming, given that she probably owed much more to the credit card company than we would likely be due in compensation for PPI payments.

Last year I paid for a year's subscription to a well-known 'internet security' software product and later realised that I had been charged about £9 for UK VAT that had been included in the price. The supplier company is based in the UK, but I am resident in Jersey, Channel Islands, an area which is outside the scope of VAT (although a domestic 5% sales tax is levied on goods and services over a certain value). I should add that I was using the software for purely domestic and not business purposes. When the time came to renew my subscription, I queried whether the company had the right to charge me the VAT. The e-mail reply that I received stated that the price of the internet security subscription was "the same with or without VAT, we can include the VAT percentage in the invoice for companies that use it to deduct from local taxes. In your case for the Channel Islands, the price is in full with 0% VAT." Consequently I declined to renew my subscription, not only because of the VAT issue, but because I thought they were overcharging for their product anyway. I have since come across the EU rules on 'Electronically Supplied Services' that came into force in 2003. On the face of it, 'downloaded software (including updates of software)' clearly seems to be covered by this definition. However, having read the information sheet provided by HM Revenue & Customs, I am still not sure whether or not a UK company supplying software to a Channel Islands non-business customer is obliged to add UK VAT and am therefore hoping that CAG members might be able to enlighten me a bit further. I am sorry but I am being prevented by petty board rules from including the appropriate link to the 11-page HM R&C information sheet with this message, but below I have quoted some extracts. There seems to be a contradiction in the HM R&C rules. On the one hand, they state that the use and enjoyment provisions do not apply where (amongst other things) "the supply is to a private individual or non-business organisation..." (page 6 of 11). This would appear to mean that I would indeed be liable to pay UK VAT even though I am using and enjoying the product outside of the EU. On the other hand, it states at the top of page 2 that "if you are a UK supplier of these services, you will no longer be required to account for VAT on supplies to: businesses in other Member States or non-EU customers (except, in certain circumstances, where they are used and enjoyed in the UK)." Note that it doesn't specify that the non-EU customers have to be business ones. This sounds more promising. Furthermore, it states the following at the top of page 4: "The place of supply is where the customer belongs when electronically supplied services are received by: any customer who belongs outside the EU or a customer who belongs in a Member State, but in a different country (EU or non-EU) to the supplier, and who receives the supply for business purposes or a private individual or non-business organisation who belongs in a Member State, when supplied by a non-EU business." It goes on to add that "supplies by UK providers to customers in the first two categories above are not subject to UK VAT because they are outside its scope." Therefore I take the above to mean that even if I don't qualify under the use and enjoyment provisions, I should still be exempt from paying UK VAT for my internet security under the place of supply provisions, because I am a customer who belongs outside the EU. What does everyone else think?