A reader called Martin signed up with Yuno, the fairly new player on the Irish domestic energy market not long ago and was less than impressed when a so-called “billing error” late last month saw substantially more than he had been anticipating leaving his account.
Given that it happened close to the end of January, possibly the leanest period of the year for many people, he was doubly displeased.
“This month my bill is €378,” he writes but on the last weekend of last month he noticed on his bank app “that there was a pending payment to Yuno for €870″.
It was a Saturday and Martin immediately called the Yuno customer support team and a “representative said there was a note on his system that there was a billing error and they were looking into it”.
He hoped that the €870 would not be debited from his account as the company had identified it as an error and was – as you can imagine – less than impressed to be told that if the payment that was scheduled to be taken was actually taken, then he “should get the money back in 21 days”.
Given that it was a Saturday there wasn’t a whole lot Martin could do except wait to see what would happen next.
What happened next was his fears were realised.
“The money was taken out of the account the following Monday morning and I rang customer care again. I got the exact same response – that it was a billing error and they were looking into it,” he says.
Martin is pretty infuriated not least because, as he says, Yuno did know there was a problem days before it took the money from him and yet the company still took it.
“Nobody contacted me to inform me about this error and if I hadn’t spotted it in the AIB app I might never have known,” he writes.
“I now need to go back over every bill I have had from them and cross check it against what they actually took out of my account. I still haven’t heard anything about getting the money back.”
To save him the trouble of doing that, we contacted the company and in response it offered its apologies to our reader and confirmed that he was not alone.
A spokesman said there were “a number of other customers who had a similar issue” over the last weekend in January.
“We can confirm that we processed a refund to the customer who contacted you on Wednesday of this week – five days after his card was charged with the incorrect amount [the customer confirmed to us yesterday that he received the payment],” the spokesman said.
He told Pricewatch that the issue arose during “a scheduled upgrade to the company’s billing system which took place last Friday”.
“We identified the issue ourselves on Saturday and we realised that it had affected some customers who were charged on Friday and Saturday. ”
The company said it then “halted all billing and identified all the accounts which had been impacted. Refunds to all affected accounts began on Saturday with the last being processed on Wednesday [5 days after the issue occurred].”
The spokesman noted that it “may take a day or two for the refund to reach the relevant debit/credit card after we have processed it”.
When it came to the information Martin was initially given, suggesting that it could take as long as three weeks before any refund was processed, the spokesman said that that only “applies in the case of complex issues which require investigation. It was not relevant in circumstances where the company identified the error and where it began processing repayments on the same day the error was found”.
