"Two telecoms firms, TalkTalk and Tiscali, have repaid nearly £2.5m to customers who were billed for services that had been cancelled.

The regulator Ofcom received more than 1,000 complaints but estimated some 62,000 could have been affected.

The customers had typically complained about aggressive demands for the payment of bills they did not owe.

TalkTalk blamed a new billing system introduced after it bought Tiscali in June 2009.

"We are pleased that Ofcom has recognised the significant steps we have taken to fix the billing issues," a TalkTalk spokeswoman said.

Compensation

Ofcom said that the two firms, who together have 4.2 million customers, had taken steps to fix the problem.

An average of about £40 has been paid to thousands of customers in refunds or compensation payments.

People must be refunded if, since 1 January 2010, they have paid bills that should not have been levied.

And credit ratings agencies must be told to repair any damaged credit histories.

Ofcom launched an investigation in July 2010 about the case, following the complaints. The firms were told to pay compensation by December or face a financial penalty.

Fines have been ruled out by the regulator, for now, but it said it would continue to monitor the situation."



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12595391

Quote:

So what was it then? Bad design of the billing system; done on the cheap or something else?

Surely the billing system did as it was programmed to do. 

Dave wrote on Mar 1^st, 2011 at 10:46am:
Probably find it wasn't tested correctly.  It happens nearly all the time.

Dave wrote on Apr 29^th, 2011 at 3:57pm:
I love the last paragraph: Quote:
No different from nearly every other company imho.

It was nice, however, to see OfcoN finally do something for consumers........ although this problem has been going on since 2006... so OfcoN must have been working overtime on finally deciding an action to take instead of it's constant soft-touch/don't want to mess with stakeholders, etc/ordinary consumers arent that important attitude lol

... or maybe one of the complainants was a stakeholder  

SilentCallsVictim wrote on Apr 30^th, 2011 at 12:40am:
I agree that Ofcon shouldn't have been used.

I don't know if end consumers went to TalkTalk/Tiscali and then otelo but were getting nowhere fast, so ended up having to go to Ofcon.

There must have been a reason why Ofcon had to intervene either because Otelo wasn't getting anywhere fast or because the severity and how long it had been going on for forced Ofcon to intervene.

Yes, this thing does happen when a company takes over another one and they obviously have more than one billing system but there was no need for it to take this long to sort out.  As the story mentioned that once Ofcon had intervened, only then did TalkTalk really start pulling their finger out.

SilentCallsVictim wrote on Apr 30^th, 2011 at 11:34am:
We agree here as well.

Quote:
If Otelo were heavily involved then I can only assume that TalkTalk werent bothered about Otelo.  Does anyone know if Otelo and the alike actually have any powers?

Quote:
We agree again lol.