British Gas opened an account in my name for an address that I have never occupied, and sent me a \u00a3571 bill. It declined to open a complaint because I \u201crefused\u201d to provide a tenancy agreement or mortgage statement which, since I\u2019ve long since paid off my mortgage, I don\u2019t have. It is now threatening me with a debt collection agency.<\/p>\n
IW, Northampton<\/p>\n
Your house is supplied by Octopus and you have no connection with the flat along the road that British Gas has conjured you into.<\/p>\n
British Gas\u2019s stance was that if you can\u2019t prove you don\u2019t live there, then you surely do. It ignored the bank statements you sent as evidence, and it never thought to question the competence of the tracing agent it uses to locate debtors.<\/p>\n
Because your address is similar to the indebted flat, the tracing agents plumped for you when there was no response to bills sent to the supply address.<\/p>\n
British Gas only investigated when I got involved. It has now belatedly apologised and removed you from its records.<\/p>\n
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com<\/a> or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"British Gas opened an account in my name for an address that I have never occupied, and sent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":530048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-530047","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}