A direct debit which is alarming.
The director of a British holiday center received an astronomical electricity bill of 244,000 pounds sterling (285,000 euros) after an error by Total Energies, the company in charge of the supply, reports the BBC.
The bank account of the holiday center, located in Cornwall, was directly withdrawn from the entire sum without the owners being notified.
“It was panic in the office,” summarized Patrick Langmaid to the British public broadcaster, explaining that his monthly bill is usually a hundred times lower than such an amount and therefore more around 2,800 euros.
Other electricity suppliers implicated
But in this story, he is far from being the only one to report such a mishap.
The BBC has noted at least four other cases of erroneous direct debits with colossal sums for those affected, from different electricity suppliers.
A church in Wales, for example, was levied 40,000 pounds sterling (47,000 euros), and owes its salvation only to a faithful who had donated his inheritance to the parish.
Three other customers report invoices of 48,000, 45,000 and 19,000 euros debited from their accounts.
Dhara Vyas, deputy chief executive of Energy UK, which represents suppliers in the country, said millions of invoices were being sent out over time, so errors at the margins were inevitable.
“Sometimes it’s human error.
Sometimes it’s an automation or machine error,” she told the BBC.
However, she stressed that it was “very important that a supplier acts quickly to remedy the situation, that it communicates well and informs the customer of what it is doing, and that it offers compensation where appropriate” .
“I thought someone was messing with me.”
Total Énergies admitted that human error had prevented the cancellation of the exorbitant bill, when it should have been.
Patrick Langmaid remains very worried after this hiccup: “I blame the company for making this mistake, the bank for allowing it to happen and the entire direct debit system for authorizing the payment without any alert.
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Alerts to regulators allowed affected customers to be refunded and compensated for the error, but for some it took months.
Maggie Boyd, a 77-year-old retiree who lives alone in an apartment in a retirement complex in Scotland, has paid the price.
“I thought someone was messing with me.
I have a cat, but I don’t think he touched the (
heating
) buttons,” she joked to the BBC.
A spokesperson for her supplier finally apologized and confirmed that the septuagenarian's customer account had been updated with the correct amounts.