Hey @treeFindGrassHopper 

Sorry to hear about the issue you’re having.

We wouldn’t expect this to be happening if the account balance is £0.

Would you be able to tell us if the letter has your name and account number on, or is it addressed to the occupier or a previous tenant? Could you also tell us if it’s from OVO or is it from a debt collections agency?

We don’t have access to accounts here at the Forum, so you’ll need to contact the Collections Department as they’ll be able to look into this and give you more information. You can call them on 0800 0699 831.

Same here - arrived today, dated 3rd May  .. account is in credit and last bill was paid within 5 minutes of me getting the email to tell me the bill was ready 

The Collections Team can fix this. If you call them on 0800 069 9831 they can check the account. If it’s definitely in good standing, they can override the system and forcibly shut down any automated debt collection activities.

Thanks. I am tempted to leave it just to see how far they’ll actually pursue a customer with credit balance  ;)

Personally, I’d say it’s actually better to solve it quickly while it’s at an early stage. Not only would it save you the hassle, but it’d free up the team to deal with actual debts. In some ways, I could argue that deliberately ignoring something like this might make things worse for everyone.

Argue all you like. Trying to speak to an actual human being at OVO is the very definition of  a seriously time-consuming hassle and several days wasted in a queue. The consequences of threats made against me, for a debt which their own letter states is £0.00 will all be on OVO’s plate and cause OVO massively more grief than they’ll cause me … and will be a juicy feast for Ofgem to sink their teeth into. . 

If OVO were a company in better standing - and had an easily contactable customer service function that wasn’t 50 shades of embarrassing - it would be a very different matter; but they aren’t and they don’t.

To be honest… Deliberately entrapping my energy supplier just to get Ofgem to throw the book at them isn’t my idea of a solution either. One small mistake with a single account alone often isn’t enough to get their attention. That feast will be more like a tiny snack that barely satisfies their hunger.

The Collections Team will probably not allow a £0.00 debt to proceed past manual review and would likely terminate the case immediately. But it’d still be more ideal to avoid them having to do that when you can just get in touch. It’s a different line to Support so you’ll get through way faster.

Deliberately entrapping? Ignoring a ridiculous letter - which, by the way, encourages me to simply ignore the letter if I have already paid the outstanding £0.00 - is not entrapment … it is following OVO’s own instructions to me. 

There is no deliberate entrapping and suggesting that there is …. is just plain ridiculous. No other words for it, to be honest.

But thanks for the laugh.

According to OVO, many thousands of these letters have gone out in error and we can expect further collection activity until they fix the error. 

It is comedy gold