Attempted to defraud me
I have rarely been more outraged by the behaviour of a company than I have with Lampiris. And believe me I've encountered a lot of dodgy companies.
I used Lampiris for 4 years for gas and electricity, but the bills kept increasing without me understanding why. So when I moved flat I decided to close my account. They offered to close account over the phone so I took this option. The lady on the phone asked me to read out the metre numbers for gas and electricity. When I read out the numbers, she suddenly complained that the line was bad and said "what was that?" even though the line was perfectly OK for me. I therefore read the number out again, more clearly, then asked her to repeat it back to me, which she did correctly. I asked whether she needed photographs of the metres but she said "no, no it's fine, don't take any photos". This made me suspicious so I took photographs.
One month later I received a bill and it is €400 too much. I immediately complained and they said "send us photographs of the metres". Fortunately I had taken the pictures, and they then said they would correct the bill. However this behaviour had made me very angry and I told them I thought they tried to defraud me - because I could see that the gas metres numbers are 14 digits long, so for the bill to be only €400 higher, instead of €400,000 or €0.04, they had to have a "mistake" in one very specific number. Clearly not a coincidence
They told me no, this was an honest mistake, and they had a recording of our phone conversation so I should not worry. I therefore requested the recording: no reply. I requested it 6 times over the course of one month but they never sent it. Then when I asked it on the 7th time, they said "sorry sir, we have to delete recordings after one month for data privacy purposes.." What the hell..
Clearly this is just a scam and they are preying on the weak and vulnerable. I was lucky not to fall for it, but other people could.
I wrote to the Ombudsman about this, but they didn't care or understand, nd they didn't do anything.
Avoid them like the plague. Someone needs to punish these cowboys. I hope they get what's coming.
2 March 2023
Unprompted review