A Scot has told of his “maddening” pursuit of a whopping £5,000 in overpayments from energy company SSE.
Blair Stewart was overcharged on his direct debits for 12 years until he installed a smart meter - and realised he was thousands of pounds in credit.
But it took five months and countless hours on the phone where he was repeatedly fobbed off before the so-called “user error” was rectified.
Blair, 37, told the 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 rang the company up to get the cash back - but the nightmare was just getting started.
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.”
And Blair, who lives in the south side of Glasgow, fears Scots all over the country could be facing rip-off direct debits.
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.
Don't miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond - Sign up to our daily newsletter here .
