‘BT wrongly charged me £2k for four years – but refuses to refund me’

Katie Morley Investigates
Katie Morley Investigates

Dear Katie,

I am a busy television broadcaster and operate several properties and a livery yard, as well as caring for my 83-year-old husband, who has severe Alzheimer’s and pneumonia.

I pay around 60 different utility bills and send out dozens of invoices each month, so as you can imagine, I have my hands full.

Because of all this I did not notice that BT was still charging me for a single line to our home, despite the fact that they had disconnected all other billing from my account in March 2020, after I notified it that I was moving all my lines and internet services to another provider.

Despite my action, and its confirmation, BT continued to charge me for the next four years and five months for a service it was not providing, until I finally spotted the error in August this year.

In total BT, has taken over £2,060 in erroneous payments. I confirmed with my new provider that the transfer had taken place as it should, which it confirmed it had.

BT is refusing to refund more than three months’ worth of the charges, which has left me depressed, angry and very stressed, at a time when my life is particularly difficult.

– Anon

Dear Anon,

You say your new provider confirmed that it had put in the transfer request, but BT told me it had no record of you informing it that you were transferring your account to a new provider before August this year, when you personally called BT.

So although you weren’t using the service, and understood that it was no longer active, BT continued to make it available to you, and continued to charge you for the privilege.

BT’s defence was that it has continued to send bills to you both online and by post the whole time, including annual price rise letters, so it would expect you to have noticed and contacted it before now.

However, it seems you didn’t notice due to the overwhelming volume of other home admin you have been wading through, on top of caring for your sick and elderly husband and holding down a high-pressure TV job.

I recognise how hard these past few years must have been for you, and I really felt for you as I could see that your unusually chaotic circumstances had caused you to miss the bills.

BT was standing its ground, offering you a slightly more generous six months’ refund, only as a “goodwill gesture”. But you insisted that OneCom, your new broadband provider, had transferred the line back in 2020, so I agreed to investigate further.

When I spoke to your case handler at OneCom, it told me that he had evidence of the account transfer from BT to OneCom in 2020 and provided me with a screenshot showing an internal screenshot from when Onecom took full ownership of this service.

Additionally, he also sent me an email from Vodafone, the broadband carrier, which confirmed that the line was transferred to it in March 2020. He not only said he felt you should be fully reimbursed by BT, but revealed that multiple other customers had also found themselves double billed after “failed” transfers to BT specifically.

I put this all to BT but it denied that the materials shared by OneCom showed evidence of a so-called “notification of transfer”. Looking at your account, it said it was unable to see any record of a notification of transfer in relation to your line, and therefore, unfortunately for you, its position remains unchanged.

Whether the error lies with OneCom for not completing the transfer correctly, or BT for failing to log and carry out a transfer request, remains a mystery. Of course, in an ideal world you would have read the bills you had been sent by BT, but since you didn’t, the only route left for you to try is with the Ombudsman.

If this dispute is between the two providers on who messed up the transfer, then I don’t see why you should be the one to pay this massive bill. You have lodged a complaint and it will now decide who, if anyone, was at fault.

Please do keep me updated. I wish you and your husband the very best at this difficult time.