Battle over £18,000 gas bill due to false readings causes family 'unreal stress'
A family mistakenly charged £18,000 for just two months of gas say they are living under an "unreal" amount of stress amid a battle with OVO Energy to fix the billing inaccuracies.
Fardusa Hassan, an NHS nurse who lives in Greenwich with her mother Halimo Mohamed and her dad, Ahmed Hassan, have been in communication with OVO for more than a year, asking them to correct an error with her parents' smart gas meter readings.
Speaking to the Mirror about her struggle to have the debt cleared, Fardusa, 37, said OVO had made "huge errors" with her parents' account, which was under her mother's name.
This included giving them incorrect estimated gas readings that saw their account charged £18,066.19 for the two months from July 9 2022 to August 9 2022.
“All of this has caused so much stress, you wouldn’t even believe," Fardusa said.
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"When I first saw that £18,000 debt, I was at work. I saw that figure and my head started spinning. When you see something like that you go into complete shock, you think, ‘What the hell?’
Fardusa says the huge sums of money being billed to their account has caused a great deal of stress (Tim Merry / Daily Mirror)
The Smart Gas Meter which was fitted at Fardusa's family home in 2018 (Tim Merry / Daily Mirror)"For the remainder of my shift I could barely function at work, all I could think was, ‘What has happened, where has this come from?’."
Incorrect readings began materialising from the smart gas meter after it were fitted at the family house in 2018. In essence it emerged the meter had reset itself to zero but then - in a short time frame - jumped back to the full tally for gas used.
This wrongly indicated an far greater rate of consumption by the family - massively skewing the estimates, wiping out the credit their account was actually in and placing it at a massive deficit.
At one point the estimated readings showed the household had gone through 1,000 m3 volume of gas units in one month - around 10 times what the average UK household would use.
Any time Fardusa’s parents paid the bills from their direct debit, rather than going towards paying their bills, the money was going towards paying the huge deficit sitting in their account.
Adding to the confusion, some of a £4,000 credit OVO had inexplicably added to the family's account before the huge charge appeared to have gone towards paying the deficit so that while the huge bill had been for £18,066.19, their account stood at -£15,740.04.
(Tim Merry / Daily Mirror)At the beginning of last year, Fardusa took on this issue herself, to help her parents who spoke English as their second language. She explained both are in their late 60s and "not 100 per cent tech savvy".
Fardusa was in touch with a number of different customer service representatives from the company over a period of months, sending numerous readings from the smart meter and photographic evidence with time and date stamps, but still the billing situation remained unreconciled.
Fardusa said: "I said: 'You’ve made this huge error, your system has made this false estimate, that’s not actually based on the estimates I’m sending you which you have photographs of'.
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“They said they were really sorry, one agent said to me: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this, it’s clearly incorrect’. I said, ‘obviously’. You could see where it was incorrect."
Fardusa claimed OVO told her they would fix the issue, but again, wasn’t given a timeline as to when it would be fixed.
At the beginning of this year Fardusa contacted the Energy Ombudsman which responded to her in February to inform her that her complaint had been upheld.
OVO said they were 'sincerely sorry' for the confusion caused (Tim Merry / Daily Mirror)An Ombudsman Services spokesperson told the Mirror: “We appreciate mistakes can sometimes happen but suppliers need to take care and ensure consumers are being billed as accurately as possible, otherwise, as in this case, it can result in distress for a consumer. The supplier has been instructed to implement the remedies put forward to them and the dispute has now been resolved.
"If consumers are unhappy with the service they’ve received, we always suggest that they raise it with their energy supplier in the first instance, who’ll aim to find a resolution. If consumers are unable to reach a satisfactory solution, and the complaint is open for longer than eight weeks, then they should contact us.”
Implementation of the ombudsman's decision was to be upheld to their deadline of March 29.
In a statement sent to the Mirror, an OVO spokesperson said: “We are sincerely sorry to Miss Hassan for the confusion caused by the incorrect meter readings and have issued a £200 goodwill amount to reflect this.
"Her account balance has been recalculated and her meter is being fixed.”
Yet at the time of writing, Halimo Mohamed's account remained £15,740.04 in debt.
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