You seem to have forgotten that in June 2007 I cancelled your service due to the general shittyness of your company. Of course the real problem is that you decided to randomly switch it back on, and expect to get paid. Well hell no. Fuck you.
We’ve spoken on the phone so many times I feel close enough to you to say - Fuck you and you empty promises. “Of course we’ll sort it.”“Oh no we’re not going to pass in onto a collections agency.” Funny, that’s not what the letter that arrived on my door step from the collections agency says. I’ve two weeks to pay or it goes to court. I’m sure you’re hoping I’ll pay just to shut you up. The fact I’m buying my first house and therefore have applied for a mortgage means you can really screw me over. Well guess what you little pieces of shit. I’m just THAT stubborn. Yes. That’s right. I’m willing to risk my first home over £120.
After another phone call today you’ve promised to get it sorted by Monday. But I’m not holding my breath. But please feel free to do so yourself.
I hope every member of your staff that lied to me dies in varies amusing and gruesome ways.
It sounds like you’re going to see the collection agency in court. Seems like you’ll be able to prove the debt is invalid, and the CA will write it off their books. But Pipex will probably never hear of it. (Then they’ll illegally sell the debt again to another CA! Yes, this happened to someone I know. That company got raided by the Feds a month later.)
When a company has been given written notification and evidence that the debt they claim you owe them is not valid, yet they persist in collection efforts, including posting it to your credit record, can you sue them for defamation of character? That is, do you stand any chance of winning?
No idea. But we’re planning on taking them to the small claims court. My husband has done most of the work. His company bills his time at £28 an hour. About 8 hours of letter writing, and phone calls. And of course the cost of the calls themselves. That should cover it. No idea if we’ll see a penny, but it’s worth a go!
I’m going through something similar with my local hospital. I had an old bill that was paid. It’s now being sold and re-sold to various collection agencies, and all I have to prove I paid the debt is the credit card receipt when I paid the bill; the hospital refused to give me a paid-in-full letter.
Fortunately, I ended up talking with the Controller of the hospital last night and he’s having the billing department manager taking care of it.
I’ve dealt with Pipex in the past as well. At the time they offered quite good broadband connection, but man! Their customer service was HORRIBLE. I won’t go into details, but I’ll just say that like AngelicGemma I spent lots of hours on the phone with them helping them to sort out their stupid bureaucratic mistakes. Among other things, like in AngelicGemma’s case, they didn’t seem to grasp the notion of cancelling the contract because I was moving. And let us not even talk about their unhelpfulness earlier on when I told them I wanted to use a router to connect both my computer and my wife’s to Internet rather than using their horrible USB cheap modem. They sounded like I wanted the moon.
In the U.S. you can sue for harassment using the mail; harassment using the phone; and intentional infliction of emotional distress, at least in some states. No idea how it works in the UK.
I believe (I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, nor even in amateur dramatics productions staged in the back room of a disused pencil factory in Neasden) that you can sue in civil court over something like “harassment in pursuit of alleged debt”. I would talk to an actual lawyer, or the CAB, or someone in the back room of a disused pencil factory in Neasden about it first, though.
Update - We got a call on Saturday from the collections agency. We explained to them that we don’t owe the debt and can prove it. They’ve said there not going to take it any further and have passed our file back to Pipex.
Called to cancel my Bell internet service several months ago. A few months ago I started receiving bills again and called to ask them wtf. Here’s a much shortened version of the most interesting parts of the conversation:
Why are you still charging me? I called and canceled the service months ago.
Hmm I DO see a record of you calling and canceling, but our system shows that your modem was still active, so the account never got canceled.
Um… what?
Yea, you were still using the service
I called and canceled it.
But you were still using it.
First of all NO I WASN’T using it, but, let’s stick to the point, I CANCELED IT.
Well it was never canceled because you continued using it.
Etc
Etc
Etc
This went on for a while and I was shaking and ready to kill the next person I saw after this phone conversation. I ended up paying the bill after two more moths of arguing because even the manager agreed with the above logic and they claimed they had proof that I had still been using it (I hadn’t been, the modem was in a drawer at the time… and anyway what would it matter?).