Hey AGL...I do not owe you any money, get fucked!

The BBQ Pit
1

About 7 months ago I moved into my current premises, and had my utilities (gas and electricity) connected through a major Aus provider, Origin Energy. I receive appropriate bills, pay them on time, and we get along just fine.

Then three months ago, I got a bill addressed to “Dear Customer” @ my residential address from another utility provider, AGL claiming I owe them $263.00.

Sensing a misunderstanding (hah!) I left work early one day so that I could ring them (their lines are only available from 8am-6pm. And I am normally gone by 7am, and don’t return until after 8pm). And they explained to me that the previous tenant had left in arrears, and the gas had not been switched off by them before I took up residence. My task was to contact my current provider, let them know what’s happened and Origin would pay out whatever to AGL and all would be sweet. Yeah, right.

I did that. Right after I’d hung up from AGL. I rang Origin and told them my story, and they sorta didn’t quite get the gist of my rambling, but hey, I’d done my bit, right?

So one month ago, I got a second notice demanding the $263 again. I rang AGL (again) and they whinged to me that they hadn’t had any communications from Origin. Like, that’s my fault, right?? FFS.

But they assured me they had put a hold on any future harrassment. Yeah, right.

Today I got a FINAL NOTICE. Again, addressed to Dear Customer (they don’t even know my fucking name!!) threatening to sool the debt collectors onto me.

Hey AGL…I am not and was never your customer. I do not have an account with you, even though the property where I live was previously supplied with gas by your good selves. I do not owe you any fucking money. I don’t owe you any celibate money either, just in case you were going to go down that track.

SOMEBODY owes you $263, I dunno who it is. Maybe it is my current provider for not swapping accounts when I signed up with them. Maybe you should ring them again, because it’s NOT MY FUCKING RESPONSIBILITY to chase up who owes what to whom.

I have elec and gas. I pay my bills on time. I don’t have any red marks against my name and I sure as hell don’t want them now, even if the collectors will be after ‘Dear Customer’, not me!

Arrgghhhhhh.

2

Have a go at them on their Facebook page. We’ve had hassles with Origin that kept being ignored month after month until we left scathing feedback on Facebook and then Hey Presto! a case manager was assigned to sort it out (it still took several more months… if we didn’t have a case manager, I doubt they’d have ever solved it). MIL also had a go at Origin on FB over her problems and ended up getting several months of bills waived. I know you don’t have FB, but a public calling-out is a good way to get the sort of attention that monthsandmonthsandmonths of phone calls, emails and letters doesn’t generate.

3

I had the same thing happen to me. Sort of. Out of the blue I started receiving electricity bills from Tru Energy, a company I didn’t know of or use, addressed to my home but in the name of a Pakistani woman.

I rang the company, informed them that they had the billing address wrong for this woman, that no-one else had ever lived here and returned the mail. When subsequent bills arrived I just threw them in the bin.

Eventually, presumably having rung the woman and obtained her real address, they began sending letters addressed to "The Occupant"asking for my details. I ignored these as well. Then I realized that I had not paid an Origin bill for about a year. When I dug out the last bill it was labelled “Final Bill.”

So apparently the mysterious Pakistani woman, in signing up, had given the wrong address and Tru Energy had just switched my address over to themselves, believing they had a customer there. Now they wanted to snare me as a customer.

When things reached the point that Tru Energy were threatening to disconnect the electricity I contacted them and the Energy and Water Ombudsman, and explained that they were trying to make me pay for a service I had never requested. At the same time I contacted Origin and had them reconnect the service in their name. This prevented Tru Energy from being able to disconnect the supply.

Things were back to normal but my year of free electricity was over. Tru Energy never asked again for a penny.

4

don’t ask, my MIL had an almost opposite experience. She tried to leave Origin for another company and each month the transfer would fail to go through. She blamed Origin for refusing to relinquish her account (though FIL indicated his understanding, the first month at least, was that the new provider failed to requisition the account from Origin). It dragged on for months, and then she was refusing to pay Origin for the months she was still with them after she’d requested to transfer to the company who were offering her a better deal. In the end I think Origin wrote off about 3 or 4 months worth of bills - and the new company upped her discount to make up for the inconvenience she’d suffered.

5

When we moved in here we got a letter from a monitored alarm company, telling us that we could either pay them 200 quid a year to monitor our alarm, or pay them 85 quid upfront to switch off the monitoring.

We decided to bin the letter and pay them fuck-all. Would you not do the same? They can’t exactly hurt your credit rating if they don’t even know your name, can they?

6

That is some phenomenal chutzpah. “Pay us money if you want us to stop providing a service!”

7

We had a similar situation happen when we were living in GA - we started getting 2 gas bills. Apparently they’d been told we’d moved out and they just started a new account for us, without cancelling the old account. I went around and around on the telephone with them, explaining that we hadn’t moved an inch. They gave up on the double billing claims, but wanted us to pay a reconnect fee. That’s when I invoked the specter of the Georgia Public Service Commission.

Next month we received one (accurate) bill. I also now have a great story to tell of the wonderful things deregulation brings into our lives. Used to be one gas company, Atlanta Gas Light Co. since 1856 handling our natural gas needs. Then some pinhead decided we needed to deregulate the natural gas industry. Poof, suddenly every goofball with a telephone is a gas company. Atlanta Gas Light still handles the actual, you know, delivery of natural gas. The trucks are the same trucks, the pipes are the same pipes, the gas is still the gas. Only difference is a gang of middlemen carving out their percentage, raising prices, and mis-handling customers.

8

Good that it worked out in your favor, but it really took you a year to notice you weren’t receiving or paying any power bills?

9

Maybe I’ve lived in Southern California for too long but…you can have 2 power\gas companies serving the same address???

10

Sort of. I don’t quite know how it works either but here we’ve got the option of getting billed either by Washington Gas or Dominion.

As Mavis Topholese noted: same pipes etc., just different people collecting the bills. I have no idea how this works, really - does company A inject gas into the common supply from one plant, and B into the common supply from another plant, or something?

11

I’m wondering what would happen if you wrote the utility company back and told them they had the incorrect service address on the bill. Give them the address of some church around the corner.

12

Alarm companies in general have a cutthroat business model, but this represents a level of sleaze I hadn’t heard of before.

Yeah, if they’d been meeting your needs for 156 years, why change? :dubious:

13

Well I was still getting a gas bills from Origin and they only come quarterly and not at the same time. And mostly I just pay the bills the day they arrive and put them away. So I was still paying Origin but apparently not paying attention.

14

I had a problem like this with PA’s energy choice system. Seems that many electricity suppliers were happily changing customers over without asking. When I corrected it with PECO (the local electricity distributor) they insisted that I owed them for breaking a contract.

I called my state’s utility commission. I was very lucky to get to a person after a short wait (the systems said it was a 45 minute wait). After explaining the situation he opened a case file.

A few days later I was notified that they had dropped their monetary demands.

15

In this part of Sacramento (and in the area of the same city I previously lived in), SMUD handles power, PG&E handles gas. In other parts of town, I’m told one can get both gas and electric service from PG&E. Don’t know if you can choose between them in any area or if they’ve carved out territories to monopolize.

16

I’m astonished that you have a choice of gas company. No matter where I’ve lived the electricity and gas were only ever supplied by one provider (not necessarily the same one). Hell, where I live now I only have one choice of cable company.

Unfortunately right now I don’t have the option of gas and it makes me very sad. :frowning:

17

The different companies are just retailers. There is a single supplier to OP’s house. He has a choice of two or three incompetent retailers who’ll send the bills and take his money.

18

Well I knocked-off early from work and rang the fuckers at 5.58pm this afternoon. I told them the same shit I’d explained the previous two times, and they told me the exact same shit that they told me last time and the time before.

“Oh, well it seems that we (AGL) are the providers for your property”

Me: “That’s nice. However I have never signed a service contract with you, so how can that be? Not only that but I have spoken to you twice before to solve the problem, yet the problem remains. How can that be?”

“Can you hold for a minute while I speak to my supervisor?”

Me: (goes to get glass of Chateaux de Dead Socks to fill the time).

“We have escalated your problem, and you should hear from us within the next 10 working days…what is your contact number?”

Me: (madly conjures up a phoney number).

Next phone call will be to the Ombudsman’s Office. AGL don’t seem to have a FB page Eliahna. I was so looking forward to spewing some vitriol there!

:stuck_out_tongue:

19

Why a phoney number? You are just making it harder on yourself. When the supervisor who can probably sort this thing out tries to call you back they’ll get a wrong number and consequently put your problem to one side.

20

They shouldn’t need to call me at all! I am not their customer: either they fix things up and I will never see a bill again, or they won’t fix it and I will get another letter of demand in app 2-3 week’s time.

At that point, I call the Ombudsman.

Having my phone number means they can identify me, thus putting a NAME to the bogus account. Not something I wanted to risk. YMMV, but given the level of bureaucratic incompetence already exhibited, I reckon I’m safer this way.

:wink: