Suspended Billing since May and now cut off

[#1]

Hi. 
I have had an ongoing issue with my bill since May of this year. I was overcharged by £4.11. I didn’t receive any bill in June July or august.  I didn’t receive any more bills until September. I have been speaking to plusnet over the last 6 months to get this rectified. I was told I would be billed for 3 months -£4.11 (monthly amount 31.89). I was billed in September for 185.22 ! . I was told to cancel my direct debit and they would get a bounce back, they would raise credits and I could pay. I kept ringing to be told no bounce back so I couldn’t pay. Then noticed a new bill had been raised. This bill was also wrong. £117.09. Rang again to be told account ledger showed £68.13 so I couldn’t pay?? Told matter would be escalated. Kept ringing. Told to wait. Told that I wasn’t to worry, it’s an internal billing issue, I won’t get cut off. New bill raised still wrong. Again told that I had to wait til it bounced back give it a few days. Rang after a few days, still not bounced back, told to give it another day, rang the next day to be told ring again tomorrow and they couldn’t take payment from me until it has bounced back. Rang again and told that it should have bounced back but hadn’t, and they would escalate it. I was told they will keep an eye on the situation. 

yesterday woke up to find I had been disconnected. No phone, no email, can’t access the portal. I rang to be told that my account had been closed and passed to debt collection agency. I was told that only a manager can sort it out. I have asked to speak to a manager and told that they will have to call me. Still no phone call. 

Is there someone who can help. So far in the last 6 months I have made 22 phone calls. I have tried to pay but been told I can’t. Now my account is with a debt collection agency. This is an urgent situation. I don’t want to end up with a bad credit score or worse. I have an “excellent” credit score (973). I always pay my bills. I can’t raise a complaint with a ticket as my account has been shut down. If I have been sent any emails I wouldn’t no as my email account has been closed. 

please help. 

[#2]

Thanks for your post @eurobuff

Having looked through what had happened, I'm really sorry to see the mess we've made of things along with the stress and the inconvenience we've caused you.

I can see one of the advisers you've spoken to has raised this to our debt management team who have agreed to recall and write off the outstanding balance which our systems have begun the process of passing to a collections agency.

We'd need to wait until the debt is passed across but our debt management team are monitoring this and as soon as it has been, they'll make sure it's written off. If you receive any correspondence from a collections agency, I'd recommend ignoring it as it may take a few weeks for us to put things right with them.

We don't carry out credit checks when setting up a home phone & broadband account, so your credit rating shouldn't be affected at all by this error we've made.

I've also put steps in place to reinstate your emails free of charge. If you can log in to Manage My Mail at plus.net/email, you'll be able to re-setup your Plusnet email address how you had it before to carry on sending & receiving mail.

I'd like to take ownership for you and I'll personally oversee this until we've got everything sorted, which also includes getting you back up and running with us as soon as we possibly can and offering a fair and proportionate goodwill gesture.

If you're happy with this, let me know by replying to this ticket https://www.plus.net/wizard/?p=view_question&id=219805126 and I'll call you back tomorrow to run through the next steps we'll need to take.

I recognise you've said you're having trouble logging into your account but you should still be able to because what's known as the "portal login component" is still active. Could you check you're trying to log in using your account username rather than an email address as the username?

Feel free to get back to me here if you still can't login though.

[#3]

Hi

Thanks for coming back to me. Regarding the account being passed to debt recovery. From other peoples experiences I have heard this before. Not about plusnet but about a mobile phone company who had passed a relatives account to debt recovery for something that they had already paid. They said that it wouldn’t affect them in anyway as they didn’t credit score their customers either, however the debt recovery agency put a mark on their file and they didn’t realise until 6 months later when applying for a credit card. It took several months to get sorted. I used to work for a bank, I know what happens. Anything that has been done with the external agency you have used needs to be reversed immediately before it goes into another month so that my credit file isn’t affected.

regarding the login. I can log into the portal using my username. When I’ve checked, my original email addresses are still showing. However when I’ve sent a test email to my plusnet account it hasn’t got there and when I send an email from the plusnet email It doesn’t send I just get an error. “No mx record found for domain“

[#4]

Hi @eurobuff thanks for getting back to me. 

I’m confident this won’t affect your credit rating, however in the unlikely event it does I’ll get it sorted out.

The debt will be recalled as soon as it reaches the collections agency. We can’t stop it from going there in the first instance sadly as the process is automated with no manual override due to the way our systems work.

However once the debt reaches the collections agency, we’ll recall it and it can take up to 10 days for their records to update to reflect you don’t owe us any money. 

I’m glad to see you can login to your account now. With regards to sending & receiving emails, the error you’ve got suggests your email address doesn’t exist. Have you set this up again by going to plus.net/email?

I’ll pick this back up with you later today when I’m in the office, if there’s a good time for a call let me know. 

[#5]

Hi

shen I log in, my email address is already showing as existing so can’t re create as it’s already there. The best time to call me is after 5.20pm which is when I get in from work. 

Please note that as my landline has been disconnected, you will have to contact me on my mobile, which I have been told had been put on your system.

[#6]

Hello,

From what I can see the only email address we've got setup for you is the default in the format of username@username.plus.com. Looking at the email notifications we've sent previously, these were to an email address in the format of mailbox@username.plus.com.

Was this address the default address renamed or an additional mailbox?

If you can't remember, do you login to your email account either at webmail.plus.net or on a mail client, using your account username, or a username in the format of username+mailbox?

If the former, let me know and I can rename the default mailbox, but if it's the latter you'll need to set it up as an additional email address by using the 'Add new mailbox' option at plus.net/email

I've added further detail to your reply over on the ticket 219805126 and I'll call you at 5:20pm today. 

[#7]

Hi my email address was the default one and this is what I also used to log into the portal and webmail in the past. I can’t log in this way now and instead use my user name only (for both). When I log in to the portal to manage my email addresses I can see my original default email address is still showing. I am getting a domain doesn’t exist error when trying to send to that email

[#8]

No problem, looks like something went wrong when I reactivated your account as I've just tried to rename your default mailbox to what you had before, but the system was saying the email address already existed even though it didn't. 

I've reprocessed the account change to Plusnet Mail again now and I've managed to create your email address. 

It may take half an hour for you to be able to send & receive mail from it. Let me know how it goes.

[#9]

Hi Anoush

Just noticed on my original account, that another bill has been raised £242 which has an early termination fee on it?

[#10]

Hi @eurobuff

This is the original bill that's no longer outstanding with us and in the process of being passed to a collections agency.

As soon as it's reached them we'll make sure we recall it

[#11]

Hi anoush

Thanks. Just had a call from Salma to say that the engineer doesn’t need to visit as there is already a master socket in the house. The connection date has now been changed to 6th December though

[#12]

Hi @eurobuff

Thanks for the update.

Ah that's some good news. I hadn't quite got round to getting in touch with our suppliers yet, but it was on my list to do before I rang you today. Looks like Openreach have automatically identified a stopped line at your address even though their systems weren't showing this for us, so they're reactivating the line remotely.

The delay to the 6th December was based upon engineer availability, however with this new development, I've raised to a colleague and I'm looking into this further to see if we can bring it forward...

[#13]

Hi 

Today has been a disaster! I had a text and email from the debt recovery people to contact them “urgently”. I rang them to be told that they had heard nothing from Plusnet in regard to recalling the file, and they were expecting me to pay. I rang someone at Plusnet (you will see details on the ticket) to be told that the file hadn’t been requested to be recalled and that she would escalate this to debt recovery to deal with. This was at lunchtime today. 

Also I have received an email (timed at 2.53 AM) to say they had connected my phone line. I tried it but it wasn’t working. I wasn’t able to ring till after work, as I had spent my lunchtime on the phone to debt recovery & plusnet about the first issue. I queried the time of 2.53am And surely this couldn’t have been connected at this time, but was told that the engineers sleep at the exchange!!! The advisor checked the line and said that it was showing a disconnect along the line, and that it was probably connected but then disconnected again!!!! She has logged it as a fault, but the engineer date is 2nd December! Then at 10pm tonight I get a message saying my broadband is ready to go, it isn’t. 

This isn’t a very good start, it looks as if this is just carrying on. I don’t want to be billed for a service starting today 30th November as obviously it hasn’t. I am wondering if there’s been mix up with open reach and the still have the install date as 6th December? 

[#14]

Thanks for getting back to me @eurobuff

@eurobuff wrote:

Today has been a disaster! I had a text and email from the debt recovery people to contact them “urgently”. I rang them to be told that they had heard nothing from Plusnet in regard to recalling the file, and they were expecting me to pay. I rang someone at Plusnet (you will see details on the ticket) to be told that the file hadn’t been requested to be recalled and that she would escalate this to debt recovery to deal with. This was at lunchtime today. 

I've explained that we'd have to wait until the debt is with the collections agency before we can recall it and this process can take up to 10 days, in the meantime I'd recommend ignoring any correspondence you receive. 

Also I have received an email (timed at 2.53 AM) to say they had connected my phone line. I tried it but it wasn’t working. I wasn’t able to ring till after work, as I had spent my lunchtime on the phone to debt recovery & plusnet about the first issue. I queried the time of 2.53am ‌‌ And surely this couldn’t have been connected at this time, but was told that the engineers sleep at the exchange!!! The advisor checked the line and said that it was showing a disconnect along the line, and that it was probably connected but then disconnected again!!!! She has logged it as a fault, but the engineer date is 2nd December! Then at 10pm tonight I get a message saying my broadband is ready to go, it isn’t. 
 

This isn’t a very good start, it looks as if this is just carrying on. I don’t want to be billed for a service starting today 30th November as obviously it hasn’t. I am wondering if there’s been mix up with open reach and the still have the install date as 6th December? 

I'm sorry to see there's a fault with your service after the order completed. From what I can see this looks to be as a result of us requesting the engineer visit is removed from the order, so the order completed to try to reactivate the line remotely, without an engineer going out to connect the right line at the exchange, because the stopped line you were on looked to have already been re-used to another property (which was the reason we had to place a line installation order).

I can see we've raised a fault report to our suppliers and we've been given an estimated response time of by 02/12/21 23:59:59 for an engineer to go out and investigate further. With any luck they won't need access to your property but as I've explained previously, I can't guarantee this as engineers do occasionally need to test things from a master socket.

I'll sort the billing side of things out with you once you're up and running as that's priority first.

[#15]

Hi

I’ve had a text at 10am to say there was a problem processing my broadband order? I’ve rang customer services and been told another order had been raised in error but that she’s cancelled it down!