Tiscali

Reminder Received for Full Amount and My Reply

18 02 07 - 11:39




Shortly after I received the letter informing me that Tiscali had agreed to my original statements and was processing the refund (which will be refunded to my Tiscali account as I have already reclaimed the money through the Direct Debit indemnity scheme)Anyway a few days ago (15th February) I received the following;

REMINDER

Dear Mr Ben Tasker,

Amount due: £35.40

Our Records indicate that the above balance is outstanding on your account. If you have cleared this amount within the last few days, please disregard this letter

Alternatively, please call our Payments & Collections Team within the next 7 days on 0870 740 0960 to arrange settlement of the outstanding balance and also to update your payment details.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Yours sincerely,

Tiscali UK Limited
Tiscali Payments and Collections Team.

Now the previous letter from Tiscali said my 'refund' could take up to 14 days to process, but this letter gives me just 7 days to make payment. I am far too paranoid to just ignore a reminder letter as the next step is often Credit Reference Agencies. In an ideal world the departments would communicate with each other, so the Payments and collections team would already know that a refund was due, even if it had not yet been processed. So to avoid myself having to deal with any credit reference agencies I sent the following letter;

Dear Sir/Madam,

Despite having recently received correspondence from Tiscali to notify me of Tiscali's decision to refund the amount taken from my account incorrectly, I have recently received a reminder from Tiscali for the amount of £35.40. The Reminder carries the reference number RL1/UI86QVK7270MTI. As Tiscali stated that it could take up to 14 days to process the reimbursement of my account the letter states that I should make contact within 7 days. As previously stated I am not willing to pay National Rate charges in order to contact Tiscali every time they make an error. Please also find enclosed an invoice detailing Tiscali's current outstanding charges as notified in my letter dated 21-01-2007.

Thank you for your time

Yours sincerely

Ben Tasker

and I included an invoice for my letter charges.

Hopefully Tiscali will realise that they need to shape their organisation up a bit, perhaps then consumers will get a reasonable service. Interestingly having been discussing this on the LXF Forums it would appear that quite a few people have had issues when trying to leave Tiscali.

Updates when I get them!