Thank you again Jaime for your quick response and I will keep the thread updated

Didn't mean to sound defeatist, its just these things start to wear you down after a while. Your right if people don't take these things further then companies like HD will carry on getting away with it. With that in mind I'm going to take your advice and complain to the FOS, as you said what have I got to lose. I will contact HD first to confirm that the letter I have received is their final response and then use the link you've provided. Let the battle begin

Thanks for the advice unclebulgaria67, I have had in the email a copy of the letter they sent to me and from what I can gather it is the final response from Hastings Direct. At the end of it they have even said if I remain dissatisfied I can refer the matter to the FOS and they have even given me the contact details, so as I said in my previous post they really don't seem to care one way or another. I'm not even sure if it would be worth pursuing because as their letter states it was in their T&C's and that they also notified me by letter where the payment would come from.

Thought I'd update you all on how things have progressed. In short no change. Hastings Direct are unwilling to budge from there initial decision. As far as they are concerned as its stated in the their T&C and that they also stated it in a letter they sent me (which I don't recall) they can take money from a third parties debit/credit card. The only new thing I've learned is that their response times to emails is terrible, even though I was promised a reply before Xmas I didn't receive one and I had to keep chasing to finally get a reply. I would like to say though that Jaime on here was very good in replying and I do thank him for trying to sort out this problem for me. I currently still don't have the money to pay the £41 that I owe, this includes the £20 late payment penalty, so it looks like I will have to take the car off the road until I get paid. I am then going to get insurance with another company, I would rather pay the £55 cancellation fee plus the initial fee to the new company then carry on with Hastings Direct, will Hastings Direct be bothered? Not in the slightest.

If you see my post about Hastings Direct you'll see I've been having problems with them as well. I too was slapped with the £20 penalty charge as well. I had exactly the same response as you, ' If we do it for you we'd have to do it for everyone', they seem unwilling to budge and don't care if you no longer insure with them. Like you I for one will never insure with them again.

Its good to see that I've got a reply from the Hastings Rep. Email has now been sent, lets see what happens next

I have to agree, I can't believe they can take money like that. It will be interesting to see if the Hastings Rep responds to this post.

Hi HB, I had split it into paragraphs but when I posted it had been all merged into one big paragraph. I've just gone in to try and fix it but every time it comes out the same, any suggestions?

Hi All, Just thought I'd share my recent experience that I had with Hastings Direct car insurance. I took the insurance out about 6 months ago and my mum kindly lent us the money on her debit card to pay the initial fee as we were a little short on cash, I then set up the direct debit with my account details for the monthly payments. This has all been going well until last week. November was a tough month for us and so we couldn't afford to pay the DD on the due date but would have the money about a week later, I had the usual email/letter for Hastings about the late DD payment and so phoned them up to explain that I could pay them in two days time, the chap I spoke to looked into this and then said "O don't worry we've attempted to take it again and been successful, if the system cant take the DD first time it tries again a few days later". I knew there was a bit of money in the account for food shopping and resigned myself to the fact they we wouldn't be able to get that much shopping that night, and thought that was the end of the matter. Imagine my surprise then when last week my Mum phoned me asking why Hastings Direct had taken money out of here account last month. I phoned them up and asked them to explain why they had taken an unauthorized payment from my Mothers account and was told according to the T&C's if a monthly DD payment was not paid they will attempt to take it from the card that the original payment was made from. I was not aware of this in the T&C's but accepted the fact that I should have read them more carefully but explained that in the previous call I was told that my DD payment had been successful and that there was no mention that it had come from my Mothers card. The answer I was then given was unbelievable, "we don't need to tell you where the payment was taken from". I then tried to explain that when I had previously phoned it had been about my DD, as the call centered on the DD and nothing else I assumed as would most people that when I was told the payment was successful it referred to the DD, once again I was told they didn't have to tell me where the payment had come from, in fact the person I was speaking to was coming over very arrogant and unsympathetic I asked to speak to his line manager. To cut a long story short the line manager said the same thing all though she was very sympathetic, explained that I should have been told where the payment had come from and then refunded my Mums money back to her account (meaning I now owe them the money just before Xmas) and also sent me a cheque for £10 for the inconvenience. She also removed my Mums card details from the system. the moral of this story is if you use a different card for the initial payment once its gone through get it removed from the system, never assume anything when phoning Hastings Direct no matter how obvious the subject may be and from a personal point of view be very wary of using Hastings Direct as an insurance company. I will never use them again and may in fact cancel my policy with them even though it would mean paying a fee. Shocking company with a shocking customer care center.

Thanks

Thanks Brigadier and Bazooka, That short and sweet letter will be winging its way to them soon. Should I do it recorded delivery again? Although it seemed a waste of money last time

Hi All, It looks like CRS have totally ignored my prove it letter (its still not showing as delivered on the royal mail website) as I've just received a letter stating that as I had failed to respond to their previous communications they intend to instruct one of their representatives to make attendance at my address in the next 7 days. It the has the usual rubbish of please contact us to avoid this course of action blah blah blah. There is still no indication who this debt is for just the same meaningless ref number. What should my course of action be and also is this anything to worry about.

Thank you all for you advice. BG phoned me back today to apologise, the letter was sent out just after I had spoken to them. They said they will inform moorcroft and that no more letters will come out to me and I can pay the outstanding balance back at the beginning of Jan. I told them I wasn't happy with the way that everything had been handled and that it was terrible customer service and all I received was a pause and then another apology.

And so the saga continues! I thought I'd finally sorted this out, had a BG complaints person phone me back to apologise for the way things had been handled and offered another £20 off the bill in regards to the credit left on our old pay meter, this then brought the bill down to £27 which I asked if I could pay after Xmas, was told that a 30 day hold and been placed on the bill and if I was happy with the outcome which I said yes. So all sorted...... NO A few days after the phone call I receive a letter from Moorcroft Debt Recovery for an outstanding balance of £47 plus a £5 charge. This now becoming more than a joke and is causing me a lot of stress, I think another complaint is due

Thanks dx for the advice. I'm going to email their complaints department first as I think the whole thing is diabolical, how difficult can it to produce a final bill when they have been supplied the correct details. Will let you know how I get on.

First of all thank you dx100uk for replying to my posts. I have now had a letter and copies of my bill from BG showing where this money owed comes from and its made things a bit clearer now. Apparently when they credited my account the bill they used was from Sept 2011 to Nov 2011, they had not included Dec 2011 to Apr 2012 and his is where the outstanding amount comes from. The letter states that "As you will see on the bill dated October 2012 this is a replacement bill for the bills you received online dated February and April 2012". "On this bill it shows that a credit of £xx.xx was transferred to your new account. This should not have been actioned as the final bill hadn't been generated on the old address". Can they still demand the amount owed? I assumed from the email I received from them that once this amount had been credited to my account that the account would then be closed. This is now becoming farcical, I have done everything right my end but BG are the ones who have repeatedly made the mistakes and have even admitted so, but its me who now has a bill I didn't think I had that has to pay. I realise that it may not be a large amount and some people might say just pay it, but money is tight enough already and I don't have this amount of spare cash. Also I forgot to mention in my previous post that BG still owe me money from when they changed over my key meter. Could somebody please advice me on how I should proceed.

Ok a manager from BG has now phoned me back with a slightly different story. Apparently this outstanding amount is now from the Nov - April bill and not from the change over in August as I was first told. As I mentioned in my previous post there was a delay in putting in the information onto the old account which resulted in an incorrect bill but was eventually resolved so we had £90 credit. It seems that BG neglected to remove the final amount that was used from the Nov - April period so rather than being £90 in credit it should have been £23 in credit. They have admitted it was their error and as a gesture of goodwill are willing to deduct £20 of the outstanding amount leaving an outstanding bill of £47 which they say i need to pay. My argument is that as far as I was concerned I had been in credit through out that period and had done everything correctly when I moved house, it was then down to me to keep phoning and emailing BG to try and sort out the problem. I even have an email from them apologising for the error and saying that the account would be back dated and closed down from the 15/04/2012. My question is can they still demand this outstanding amount from me?

Hi All, I'm hoping somebody might be able to give me some advice to help me when BG phone me back. Here is the problem. Sorry if this a bit long winded. We moved into our current address in April this year and I sent BG a final meter reading from our old address which left us in credit. So far so good, BG already supplied electricity to our new address so decided to stay with BG. A few months later we get a bill from BG for our old address, I phoned them and told them we didn't live there anymore and when we did leave we were in credit, the person on the other end said they would sort it out. A few weeks later I get a call from debit collection part of BG asking for money for a bill at our old address, once more I explained it all to them again and was told it would be sorted. A few more weeks pass by when we get a final demand bill for BG for, you've guessed it, our old address. As you can imagine I was now getting very peeved and this time wrote them an email from their website complaining about this. I received a reply apologizing for the mistake, apparently the final reading hadn't been entered in but it had now been all sorted and the account would be credited back. I checked our old account and true to their word there was now £90 credit sitting in our old account, I then transferred this to our current account and thought that would be then end of it. This month I received a letter from BG asking for £67 for our old property, once more I phoned and have been now told something completely different. Last year we accidently swapped providers (we thought we were just inquiring about the other provider and by the time we released it was to late) but as soon as possible swapped back to BG, apparently this £67 is from our previous bill before we switched providers. I've asked BG that IF I do owe this amount why was it not added to the account when we switched back to them, also why has it taken this long for them to realise their mistake and also one again If I owe this amout why didn't they take it from the credit that was added to the account. The person I was speaking to has said they are going to pass it on to their manager so that they can maybe explain it a bit clearer to me. Can anybody pre-arm me with what I should say or ask in case when they phone back they still insist that I owe them this money. Once again sorry for the long winded explanation but I wanted to try and give you as much info as I could.

Nope, never stayed in a Travelodge.

Ok, just checked my credit rating with Noodle and its 1. Have searched through the different areas and can't find anything saying I owe anybody any money. Just to clarify if I do owe somebody money where does it appear in the Noodle report and what would it look like?

Just had another text from CRS telling me this is the last day our client can offer a discount. So in a period of just 3 days its gone from 'its being passed onto HL legal' to ' last chance for discount'. What are they playing at. By the way thanks to everyone who has replied to my posts, its good to know that their is somebody out their ready to listen and help.

I was trying Equifax, you fill out the online form, including payment details and the next page you go to says 'to finish your application we need ask you a few more questions please phone ......' The phone number is a 5p a minute number

Going to have to bite the bullet and phone them at 5p a minute to cancel, these company's should make people fully aware of any charges that they are liable to before you enter all of your details. Might give noodle a go then

Started using one of these so called 'Free' credit check sites and after you've entered your details, including debit card details, it then tells you to phone a 5p a minutes line to finish registration. What a rip off, its not free at all. Whats worse to cancel you also have to phone the same number.

Thanks for the reply spamhead, this was starting to play on my mind. The only thing I'm now worried about is that maybe my letter didn't reach them as its still showing up as check later.