I've been charged £13,000 for 29 days electricity and gas! Is this due to an out of line reading?

Hi and sorry to hear you are having problems with Debt Collectors.

Unfortunately it is not uncommon, and I’ve had to deal with a few myself in the past.

When you have Debt Collectors chasing you then you have to stop them, the company who has instructed them to chase the alleged debt can’t or won’t.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the Debt Collectors and the Supplier are working together, they are not and each is doing their own thing.

To deal with a Debt Collector:

Email, or write to, the Debt Collectors telling them the following in your own words and adding dates etc. as necessary, keep things polite but to the point, don’t let them sidetrack you they only do it to try and confuse things:

•     State that you are making an- Official Complaint of Harassment.
      Put that in bold, underlined, at the top of your email after the addresses, ref numbers, etc.
•     Thank them nicely for their previous correspondence
•     Tell them that the alleged debt is in dispute with the supplier.
•     Tell them that as the alleged debt is disputed with the supplier then you require that the collectors cease action until that dispute is resolved.
•     Tell them that you will not be making any payments to them, that you are not their 'customer' and will not be creating or logging into any account on their 'payment portal'.
•     Tell them that if they fail to cease action then you will make complaints of Harassment to both the FCA and the Financial Ombudsman.

Personally I also tell them that I require that all communication must be by email or letter and that I refuse to discuss anything on the phone, it they do ring me then I’ll politely hang up.

Don’t go into unnecassary details about the alleged debt with the debt collector, (that’s a mistake that most make, I know that I used to), just stick to the fact that the alleged debt is in dispute and so they should back off.

You can add the following if you want to get semi-legal back at them:
"In accordance with the FCA Handbook CONC 7.14 "Settlements, disputed and deadlocked debt" you should now suspend any and all collections activity whilst my dispute with the energy provider is still ongoing.

I am also aware that as I have made this Official Complaint of Harassment to yourselves you now are required to inform the FCA of this complaint."

What will/should happen then:

•     The collector will reply saying that they have checked with ‘their client’ and there is no dispute.
  (That’s pretty standard practice with all debt collectors but as far as I can tell they don't actually check anything. I doubt that they report your complaint to the FCA either, they should do but no one checks unless you later complain to the FCA yourself).
•     You reply back saying you are astonished to hear that your supplier told them that, and send them proof of the dispute, eg. a copy of a dispute email from the supplier or something like that.
•     At that point the collector should then reply saying that they have 'placed your account on hold for 30 days'.

If they come back after 30 days you simply inform them that it's still in dispute and that they should back off again.

I hope that the above advice helps you, it’s always worked for me, and worked for others on here who have followed it.

That is awesome...I will get on to that over the next few days.  Thank you Nukecad

I have tied that up a bit and added a few things, so you might want to read through it again.

Many thanks 👍.  I did send them some info and correspondence from OVO a couple of days ago, bit now I can format it much more clearly and make it look a lot more 'legal' and also a lot more serious in tone.

 Regards

Michael 

Hello MHarley, I have read your thread with interest, I have some additional advice for you but first need to ask is your issue resolved.....and, if so, how was it resoved?

Hello ​@Andrew Burton, it may be that you need to alert OP Michael to your interest in his case by using the tag (if that’s the correct term?) ​@MHarley which might drop an alert into his email inbox, as it may well be a few months since he’s visited this thread.  It would be interesting to know if everything is sorted, and how it panned out in the end. Hopefully though, by now it’s job done…

Walt

Hello  ​@waltyboy.

Thanks

​@MHarley would/should receive a system generated email to say his thread has been re-activated. But I notice his post is marked 'sorted', which probably explains why he hasn't posted again.

What is this nonsense? 

Ha ha and I thought my bill was bad!!🤣

Possible account issue. ​@Account1 please show us your meter reading history from MyOVO.

The reason I ask this is that if you’ve not submitted an actual reading in forever - which I think might be the case here - then this can happen. Estimated Readings have basically a 100% chance of being wrong and the longer you ignore this by not submitting actual readings, the worse it gets.

Either way, you definitely want to make sure you submit an actual reading and contact OVO immediately via https://ovoenergy.com/help . Rebuilding your account might take a while, but OVO can put measures in place to prevent further account corruption in the meantime - however you’ve gotta flag this up with Support for that to happen.

If you don’t already have one, I’d strongly recommend you (and anyone reading this!) to consider a Smart Meter and set it to Daily or Half-Hourly Readings. The more readings OVO gets, the faster this stuff can be fixed. Please see https://smart-booking.ovoenergy.com if you’re up for getting one. If you already have one and it’s not working, https://smart-meter-help.ovoenergy.com should get you back on the road.

If yours is working, you can crank up the reading schedule via MyOVO or in the app.