A Glasgow man has told of his 'maddening pursuit' of £5000 which he overpaid on direct debits to his energy company, SSE.
Blair Stewart, who lives in the southside of Glasgow, had been overcharged for 12 years until he got a smart meter installed and realised he was thousands of pounds in credit.
But it took a further five months before the money was returned to him, with him spending hours on the phone to advisors who told him it was a 'user error'.
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Blair told the Daily Record: “I didn’t think I was actually paying that much - but it turned out they had £5,000 worth of my money in credit.”
He then called the energy company to get his cash back, not realising that his nightmare had just begun.
Blair said: “Five months I was chasing it up, and eight different times I had to phone them to see what was happening.
“Every single time they gave me some cr*p excuse, a user error from our end or some problem in the system.
“I had the same conversation every single time. I think the most maddening thing was the amount of people the process had to go through.”
He now believes that there are hundreds of other households in similar situations, as stuck on hold one day for over two hours, he took to Twitter for customer support - and found “hundreds of people in the comments under SSE tweets basically in the same situation”.
But he fears others will “give up” rather than endure the tortuous complaints process for refunds.
Blair said: “I felt very defeated. See if it was only a couple of hundred quid I was trying to get back, I probably would have given up as well.”
He added: “The situation we’re in, I don’t think any of the other energy suppliers are any better.”
Blair finally got the cash owed to him in the bank just before Christmas. SSE were contacted for comment.
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