Is this fraud (and should I have paid up?)

Factual Questions
1

A pit thread about a cable TV company got me thinking. A while back, as a student, I had a cable TV account with NTL here in the UK. A sales man came round to the house (they did a lot of door to door sales in student areas) and offered us digital cable with broadband access. I pointed out we already had analogue cable, so he said he could have my account cancelled and the digital one installed instead.

So it was all arranged and my old cable box was removed and a nice new digital box left in its place with a new account in another housemate’s name. All I had to do was wait for my final bill from the old account. Which never came. I mean, a bill came, but it wasn’t the final bill, because you see, NTL regarded my old account as still active and still active for another 9 months of my 12 month contract. I rang them about this and they said they had no idea what the sales man had done and I still had my old account to pay for, all 9 months. Better yet, since I had taken over the account from an old flatmate, they had a large lump of a bill that they should have sent to me, that they sent to him and this came down on top of me with no warning.

So, I had an account I couldn’t use and a huge bill I had no way of paying off all at once. They said I could pay it off bit by bit but didn’t allow me to at least downgrade my old account to make the costs of maintaining it less (they said that as I was still paying off an old bill, changing the account at the same time would incur legal action)

This was all illegal on their part wasn’t it? It makes me bitter that they hounded me with letters telling me I wasn’t answering the phone to them. Since they had installed a new account over mine, I couldn’t use my old phone number… :rolleyes:

2

I would say they had already breached the terms of your original contract by removing your analogue box. Therefore you are no longer liable for paying for it.

Are you sure the sales man was also from NTL, and not some other company? It’s not unheard of these guys to pretend to be from your current company, and all the while angling to sign you up to another.

Their salesman (if it was their salesman) had obviously screwed up the upgrading of your contract to digital, possibly because it was originally in a different name. NTL are resonsible for the actions of their sales staff, they can’t just shrug their corporate shoulders and say “Dunno what he said, but here’s what we say.”

IANAL, but I would have told them to get stuffed and raised merry hell. I certainly wouldn’t have paid for a service I had no access to and they weren’t providing.

3

He definately was an NTL sales man, he was part of a team that regularly walks around the student area here in Belfast and he signed us up to another NTL service (they’re they only cable tv providers round here.)

I wish I had raised merry hell about it, its enjoyable to do so when you’re in the right.