N-Power stole my electricity contract. (NPower)

Member Name: chrislynch

Product:	NPower
Date:	04/10/01 (975 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Unhelpful customer service, Dishonest sales representatives

I and my partner have recently decided to change our electricity supplier to from SWALEC to SWEB. Following a visit from a rep from SWEB we signed the relevant contracts and awaited the letters to confirm the change over had taken place, something that we thought would involve very little effort by us. Sadly .. we were wrong.

Some weeks after signing the contracts with SWEB we received a letter from them which informed us that another supplier, N-Power, had already taken the contract from our current supplier and that they were unable to complete the transfer because of this. We were, to say the least, rather confused by this as we had certainly not agreed, to our knowledge, to have our contract transferred to someone other than SWEB.

That afternoon my girlfriend contacted SWALEC to find out who our supply had been transferred to. She was told that the transfer had been requested by N-Power. When she asked how this could have happened without our knowledge she was told that not all the suppliers send confirmatory letters to the client when changing contracts and that (in her experience) N-Power is one of these..

We then contacted N-Power to ask them why they had, to our minds, hijacked our electricity supply from old supplier and blocked the transfer to the new supplier. N-Power customer services informed us that they had a contract, SIGNED BY MY GIRLFRIEND, requesting the exchange. We immediately denied that this could be as we had not signed such a control (nor would we have!). However the N-Power customer services representative was adamant that the contract did exist and that the transfer was "too far gone" for us to stop it now. Our demands to have our electricity supply either returned to SWALEC or moved to SWEB were denied as, apparently, this process would take six weeks (although they seemed able to get the supply from SWALEC to themselves in much less time!). We were left with no option but to accept that our electricit
y supplier for the next six weeks would be N-Power and receive a single bill from them, following which they would change us over to SWEB.

This process left us both rather perplexed (in addition to extremely angry) until my girlfriend remembered that she had been "door stepped" by a rep from N-Power several weeks before. She remembered that he had had his "foot in the door" from the moment she opened it to him and that, when he would not take no for an answer and his manner had become rather aggressive and overbearing, that she had signed a form which he had told her was to request an information pack from N-Power.

I feel that I must qualify at this point that my girlfriend is not the kind of person who has the wool pulled over her eyes (believe me, I've tried and failed often enough). She certainly would not have signed the form had she known that it was a request to transfer our supply and she certainly did not fill in enough details for this to be completed. From our interaction with the SWEB representative we know that he would have needed to take a meter reading (as this part of their form). As the N-Power rep didn't get as far as our hallway, let alone our electricity meter, I can only surmise that the meter reading which N-Power has for us is a work of fiction. Hopefully the bill at least will be in our favour.

We contacted N-Power concerning what we saw as a clear case of fraud and they have promised to launch an internal investigation into our claim. However, we have yet to hear anything..

My advice to you all is to shut the door on any N-Power rep who comes calling and certainly never, ever to sign anything they give you. At least then you may be able to get your electricity supply back when they steal it from you.

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