How can I cancel an accidental renewal caused by a bug on the online account?

That’s not a problem either. :)

The fact that you sent the email in during the cooling-off period is what counts. Even if it takes a while for OVO to pick it up, the request will be backdated based on the timestamp of the email. As long as you sent it before the 14 days ran out, you should be good.

Hi

My old plan came to an end in May and I was quite happy for now to stay on the default variable tariff. Now I have had an Email stating that I will be moved to a 1 year fixed rate. They have also hiked up the DD payment to match the new increase above the capped variable rate.

Surely this is wrong without my permission?

Thanks

Alex

Hi @Alsgsi2 ,

I’m Blastoise186, one of the forum volunteers here. Just so you’re aware, I’m unable to access your account or make any changes per the house rules.

I don’t think this would have happened automatically. OVO requires your explicit consent to set up or renew a fixed rate deal of any kind and the billing platform does not have the capability to renew tariffs automatically - and more than likely never will. I suspect either yourself or someone with access to your account may have renewed your contract without you realising. You may want to ask around the family to see if anyone did that.

It is also worth noting that fixed rate deals are not affected by the Ofgem Default Tariff Cap or any kind of price caps. Suppliers can charge any rates they choose for a fixed rate deal on the basis you know what you’re agreeing to in advance. The price cap that’s most widely advertised is also just the national average and is not the de facto price cap for absolutely everyone in the UK.

You do have options though. If you call the Support Team on 0330 303 5063 within 14 days of receiving that email, they can cancel the fixed rate deal and investigate what happened.

Thanks for your reply.

There is only one person who could consent to a fixed rate and that is me…

I have checked out the deals on offer in the past and certainly have not consented to a new fixed rate. Ofgem for me on Monday. BTW the online billing platform is truly up the spout, mines been frozen for days so this automatic move to a fixed rate doesn't surprise me.

Regards

Alex

You’re welcome.

The frozen account issue is already under investigation for another member and I think the Tech Team will likely apply a fix for everyone who might be affected once they’ve got one ready.

However, I will notify the forum moderators @Tim_OVO and @Jess_OVO that you might also be affected. Please hang in there for a bit as they’re not usually around on the weekends.

I'm wondering if you fell victim to the fix with one click button in a renewal email that other forum members have mentioned as being rather too easy to click without realising?

It really would be good if OVO changed this as has been mentioned before, especially with such a large difference between fixed and variable rates at the moment 

That seems like an odd strategy. Some virus scanners will try the links in an email to check that they are safe. Can OVO deal with that properly? 

Thanks for the replies...all I know is that I have never clicked on a link to renew for a fixed rate. All I have ever done is looked at the fixed tariff rates. How many people must this have happened to? Surely I cant be the only one!

Going to wait until tomorrow to see if I get any response from the Emails that I`ve sent, after that I`m taking this further.

They are extremely quick at upping the DD and charging the new rate!

That’s a legacy technique that only terrible AV vendors like Norton, McAfee, Avira, AVG and Avast still rely on - it really doesn’t work as well as it was ever supposed to. Plus, that technique is completely useless if you’re using a webmail client like the web version of Gmail or Hotmail for example.

All the decent vendors like Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Sophos and Malwarebytes dropped it a long time ago, in favour of other techniques like having a massive blacklist/whitelist mechanism and real-time traffic analysis. I’ll spare you the technical details, but their methods are a LOT more reliable and catch more stuff than simply trying to scan links in emails. You can avoid issues like that by considering switching AV vendor to one of those four.

The few remaining vendors that still do it are either the terrible ones that you shouldn’t be using anyway, or they’re crumby ancient business security solutions like Websense that haven’t been upgraded in forever (seriously, if you’re using one of those PLEASE do both me and you a favour and upgrade or replace it!).

Either way, they’ll usually do the scans in a way that shouldn’t result in anything being triggered, otherwise it’d mess up all sorts of stuff like password reset links. So OVO shouldn’t really need to make any changes to fix broken AV products. And to be brutally honest, if you’re using an Anti-Virus product that behaves that way, that’s kinda your problem to fix rather than OVO’s. At least in my opinion anyway.

Ultimately, it's also pretty much impossible for websites to know whose fingers are at the keyboard, or whether a human or robot clicked a particular link from an email. Based on what I know, I don't think there's much OVO can do to fix that sort of thing and as a result, no realistic way to protect the platform from phantom clicks by Anti-Virus products. 

I have some other thoughts about this however, but I cannot publish them publicly at this time as I’m going to have to be under NDA about them for the time being.