Some energy, yesterday

Four of the ‘big six’ energy suppliers are in ‘big trouble’ with industry regulator Ofgem following mis-selling allegations and they could face ‘big punishments’ – but they probably won’t, obviously.

The face-to-face and telephone sales tactics of Npower, Scottish Power, Scottish and Southern Energy, and EDF Energy are to be investigated amid claims that some customers are finding themselves worse off after switching energy suppliers, possibly due to waffle, bollocks and mumbo jumbo.

New rules regarding sales were introduced at the end of last year, stating that potential customers must receive an estimate before a face-to-face sale is completed and that a comparison between their current and offered deal is provided. It has been alleged that this new code is not being fully adhered to. We stand amazed.

Following the conclusion of the Ofgem their CEOs could face one of the following punishments…

(a) Being wrapped up in a windsock and fired out of a cannon into the side of a shipping container.

(b) Being made to dress up as a Victorian prostitute before plying their ‘trade’ outside Millwall FC’s ground on a match day.

(c) Have their arms and legs surgically fused together before being dropped into a vat of hot tea.

(d) None of the above

In truth, it’s probably going to be (d) and they’ll probably end up with a warning or a fine that won’t actually be noticed thanks to their gargantuan profits. And life will go on pretty much the same as it was before…

Idiot

Get a quote from a price-comparison website and you might as well just start you own blog filled with loads of your personal information, then go on The One Show and tell Jason and Alex all about it. Those are more or less the findings of the dudes and dudettes at PC Pro, who have discovered just how easy it is to access the personal details of customers of Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com.

With Comparethemarket.com, PC Pro found that all they had to do to access the entire quote history of a customer was to input their email address, surname and date of birth. None of which is particularly hard to find, especially in the era of social networking where people are happy to sleepwalk their way into offering up so much of their private info.

Another idiot, with his idiot mate

By inputting those three simple pieces of information, a whole heap more was available – telephone numbers, car registration and make details, occupation, personal details of spouses as well as property details where house insurance quotes were available. Staggering stuff, and an identity thief’s dream come true.

When it came to Confused.com, PC Pro say that all that was required was to fill in a web form to reset the account-holder’s password before gaining access to quote history and further personal information. They said that any hacked account holder wouldn’t even know that someone had been sniffing aroung in their data as no email confirming the password change was dispatched.

PC Pro say that they have contacted both Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com but at the time of publishing the story earlier today, neither company had tightened up the security on their sites. Confused.com did say: “We take our customers’ data protection seriously. We are currently in the process of upgrading our password reset and retrieval methods to enhance security for our customers including use of additional security questions, and this will be available in the near future.”

The moral of the story – don’t buy your car insurance off an up-his-own-arse meerkat.

We love the Australian email troublemaker David Thorne. His 27b/6 website is a thing of much wonder and it’s always pleasing when he gets up to something that fits comfortably into our consumer remit.

Which means that we’re proud to share this email exchange with you, as David tries to explain to his electricity supplier why his bill might be slightly higher than normal…

We’re not going to give away too much but you should definitely read it. It features He Man, cows in dark forests, portals, the Large Hadron Collider and an accidentally-cooked cat.

Oh, and he gets a partial refund as well. Think on, next time you get a large leccy bill…

Are you a Londoner who has to use the Tube? Or a tourist who has also been forced to travel on the underground network of horrible iron snakes? Nasty isn’t it? But did you know that if your harrowing snake ride is late by 15 minutes or more, you are entitled to a voucher refund of your journey cost? Well get this – you are!

Back in July, 31,356 people applied for refunds, bagging themselves a total of £84,661. But crucially, almost a million more passengers who were victims of late Tube journeys didn’t try and get their money back, either through lack of awareness or because the process was too laborious.

Helpfully, there’s a website that supposedly acts as a one-stop shop for late journey claims – mytubewaslate.com. The site lists all late Tube journeys and once you find the one you were on, click on it and they’ll do the rest for you. Then you simply sit back and wait for your compensation vouchers, that you can then use on another cramped, uncomfortable trundle through the darkness of our capital’s detestable rat-infested underground network.

The money

Any of you thrifty sorts still save loose change in a big whisky bottle or a large sock? You definitely should because, as they say, look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.

A Chinese businessman, know only and enigmatically as Mr Zhao, has been saving up pocket change over the years and finally traded it all in (all £9,500 of it) for… a van.

Mr Zhao pitched up at his local van dealership in Jining, in northern Shandong province with bundles of the notes, none of them worth more than about 10p and extra staff were brought in to count it all. Yeah, cos THAT would happen in a UK dealership wouldn’t it avid readers?

It took a bunch of them more than a day but in the end, the cash amount was confirmed as being correct and Mr Zhao tootled off in his new van.

But, in a development that we’ve just made up to enhance the story a bit, tragedy struck within minutes as he lost control of the van and ploughed it into the side of a tunnel. He’ll never be forgotten – he was the People’s Chinese Businessman.

So then, just how much loose change have you got squirreled away around your house and what could you buy with it?

[BBC]

Now seems as good as time as any to scare the living hell out of people, so that’s what the Telegraph have promptly gone and done today:

Yes, everything is going to turn to shit very quickly, because interest rates are going to soar through the roof. What is this entirely hypothetical doomsday scenario based on, then?

A leading think tank warned that the Bank of England may have to increase interest rates sharply – to as high as 8 per cent – to choke off soaring inflation. Once lenders have added their profit margins, it could push the rates offered to home owners to 12 to 14 per cent, according to personal finance website Moneyfacts.

Of course these numbers aren’t entirely relevant to the reader; what the Telegraph needs to do is frighten them with an example expressed in pounds that’ll make them break down on the spot:

“At 14 per cent, borrowers would pay £1,750 a month on an interest only mortgage of £150,000. It compares with a monthly mortgage payment of £313 for those with the same mortgage, but paying a rate of just 2.5 per cent.”

Suffering Jesus! Surely that would lead to tens of thousands of mortgage payments being defaulted on, homes beings repossessed, property values plummeting and banks that are already in the financial mire being stuck with negative equity? An- oh, wait a minute, did you say:

“…according to personal finance website Moneyfacts.”

You mean you’ve based this story on a press release from a website that provides price comparisons for financial products? Like mortgages, for example? I see.

The Telegraph piece is puffed out with a couple of other expert views, but not one single quote to provide any balance, not even to suggest it might not be as bad as all that. Of course there’s a chance it could happen – there’s been talk of interest rates rising for months – but there’s nothing like a proper scare story to grab a few column inches, is there?

It might be a deeply unfashionable retail stop-off point or it might be highly fashionable in an ironic kind of way, but there’s no stopping the rise and rise of Poundland.

The budget retailer has announced a rise of annual operating profits by 81% to £21.5m, on turnover up 28.7% to £509.8m. In these austere times, them’s some pretty mighty numbers and it’s almost certainly the impending age of austerity that’s got the punters flocking through the Poundland doors.

They’ve also announced the opening of another 50 stores in addition to the 263 they’ve already got, a move that could create as many as 2,000 jobs. Many of the 56 stores they have opened in the past year have been in former Woolworths sites.

Are you a Poundland shopper? And if not, to be perfectly frank, why not?

The other day, a fierce row broke out in Bitterwallet HQ over which country had the craziest coins as actual legal tender. We did some brief research and it turns out that the answer is… Somalia. Because, you know, they’ve had nothing else major to worry about there in recent years…

Here’s some of our favourites – the 3D coins…

…the flash motorbike coins…

…the fast car coins…

…the rock guitar coins…

…and of course, the animals…

[AdvanceLoan]

Avid Bitterwallet reader Matt found himself dropping into Subway on the way to his weekend match of the season:

I immediately noticed that prices had bumped up a little, but that’s the way of the world nowadays, so I sucked it up and bought my usual belly filler.

When paying I noticed there were some SubCards sat on the counter.

I grabbed one gleefully and wondered if they had reprised their old stamp reward service, but in a more technologically advanced form.

The SubCard is also available as an iPhone app – surely that means it’s already better than the paper book of vouchers Subway used to do with buy one, get one free offers? Nah. Once home, Matt decided to check up on the value of his newly beloved SubCard – the detail is hidden away amongst the FAQs:

What are SUBCARD® loyalty points and how do I earn them?
Loyalty points are our way of rewarding you for being a loyal SUBWAY® customer. You will automatically earn points every time you make a purchase at participating SUBWAY® stores and have your SUBCARD® scanned. You earn 1 loyalty point for every 10p [UK] or 15c [ROI] you spend.

What can I redeem my SUBCARD® loyalty points for?
500 points can be redeemed for a regular 6” Sub, wrap or salad and with 1000 points you can redeem for a regular 12″ Sub.

In other words, you need to hand over £100 to Subway to claim a 12 inch sub. To claim a 6 inch sub (which costs as little as £2.29 through the Sub of the Day deal), you’ll need to spend £50 over the counter. You’d have to buy the Sub of the Day 23 times in order to receive another one for free.

Loyalty deals are obviously nothing new, but they seem to have lost their way in recent years; in March, Costa Coffee scrapped their “buy 10 get one free” card and replaced it with a points-based scheme that’s the equivalent of ordering 20 coffees worth £2 to get the 21st free.

So what do you do – spend the neck-end of £100 for a free sandwich and coffee? Or follow the bargains, wherever they happen to be? You know the score, frugal citizen.

Moira Stewart telling you you're screwed, yesterday

Ah, HMRC. If we were to offer a prize for a more original explanation what the abbreviation might stand for, there’d be no shortage of entries. Tax is, in a word, taxing, and paying it always makes you want to cry all the moisture out your head.

And so to a seemingly annual tale – around 15 million people may have paid too much tax, because HMRC are still incapable of issuing the correct tax codes to poor bastards like me and you.

How much tax have we incorrectly paid? It’s reported £238m has been collected in error over the past tax year – an increase of £96 million on the previous year. Gah. The massive increase is because of a new computer system introduced last year, that will one day achieve sentience and likely kill us all.

According to the Telegraph, “examples of the Revenue’s errors include people having their personal tax allowances removed, being placed on higher tax codes or even having a ‘1′ inserted in front of their salary, erroneously inflating their taxable income by £100,000.” A spokesman for HMRC said:

“Our contact centres are able to quickly correct inaccuracies, when contacted by the taxpayer, in part because the new system has for the first time created a single taxpayer record which the contact centre operator can access and amend.”

You’ll notice the key phrase there – “when contacted by the taxpayer”. In other words, HMRC aren’t going to coming knocking on your door if they’ve got it wrong, especially as they still have a backlog of millions of cases from previous years to assess.

Hey! Skin cream fans! Would you prefer to pay £225 or £9.99 for a luxury product for your epidermis? That’s the question that Superdrug are asking as they prepare to launch a budget version of a fancy, expensive skin cream.

Their Optimum overnight skin renewal serum will hit the Superdrug shelves in October and its says here that it uses the fruit of the Uttwiler Spatlauber, a rare apple tree that is normally used in high-end, uber-expensive skin care products.

Superdrug’s Andrew Groom told the Daily Mail: “In today’s economic climate customers are getting savvier in their skincare shopping. Why spend £200 on a jar when you can buy the exact same active ingredient for a tenner?”

“In our product customers are paying for the ingredient; not glossy advertising, photographs of an airbrushed supermodel or fancy packaging. ‘With cutting-edge skin care such as this it’s the active ingredient that counts.”

Mind you, this WAS in the Daily Mail, so we wouldn’t be surprised if they’re telling us that the stuff could give you cancer before the year is over.

Hmmm, that reminds us. We must dig out some of our old albums by early 70’s prog rock pioneers Uttwiler Spatlauber…

An ash cloud, yesterday

The wretched ash cloud may be long gone but the hangover from its brief, brutal reign over us all continues.

Ryanair have already been in the news after they failed to follow EU rules and provide hotel and meal costs for stranded passengers and now Dutch airline KLM are in a similar position.

EU rules say that in the event of a flight cancellation, the airline must pay out reasonable expenses for accommodation and meals for their stranded passengers. The rules were designed with short-term travel disruptions in mind but the arrival of the evil ash cloud changed everything.

The BBC report that KLM currently face legal action from the EU after stating that they will only reimburse passengers for 24 hours of the period they were stranded during the ash cloud saga back in April.

An EU spokesdude growled: “EU passenger rights are there to protect consumers. And they are there to act as a safety net for passengers – even in very difficult circumstances like this. So there is no grey area for us in this regard and those EU rights must be respected.”

Initially, Ryanair refused to pay the full expenses of their stranded passengers but the Sky Marshall and his droogs eventually relented. Still, there’s no such thing as bad publicity is there?

They’re the financial equivalent of a greasy burger from a manky caravan parked by the side of the road, but figures show that the payday loan is more popular than ever before.

This is in spite of APR rates of almost 2,500 per cent in some cases and their rise in popularity has been boosted by the fact that the high street banks are continuing to be miserly with their money when it comes to lending.

Consumer Focus have said that 1.2 million people are taking out payday loans every year, borrowing a total of £1.2 billion, figures that have quadrupled since 1996. As a result, Consumer Focus are calling for more safeguards to be introduced in order to help those borrowers who get out of their depth and are unable to meet repayments.

But many of those people only borrow small sums for short periods of time to tide them over, so are payday loans really as toxic a form of borrowing as the media makes out? Are they just a more legitimised form of the local loan shark or are they a necessary feature on the financial landscape?

Have any of you lot had a payday loan or considered getting one? If you have had one, did it make you feel dirty or did it get you out of a short-term pickle? Did you fall behind with the repayments and get a visit from a cricket bat-wielding man called Big Vern? Let us know in the box below…

Lord Sun, yesterday

We’re all keen on using alternative sources of energy that won’t kill penguins, and solar power seems to be becoming increasingly popular, what with Lord Sun being our best friend and that.

As a result, there’s been an increasing number of deals on the market of late, with companies offering free solar panels in exchange for a slice of the money saved against regular, penguin-killing energy bills.

But it seems that the deals aren’t all that they’re cracked up to and that you might be better off funding the purchase and installation of the solar panels yourself rather than being dazzled by the word ‘free’.

The Guardian report that: “under the “free solar” model, a homeowner would save in the region of £2,750 on energy bills over 25 years, the length of the tariff offer. By paying for their own panels with a loan at 7.7% interest repaid over 10 years and earning income from the feed-in tariff, they could save around £6,506 over the same period.”

Additionally, Consumer Focus have published a lengthy checklist of 24 questions that anyone planning to install solar heating should probably be asking, including ‘If a giant comes along and puts his thumb on my solar panel, will my telly stop working?’

Ah hang on, we’ve just checked. That isn’t one of the questions. Sorry.

Soon it’ll be far easier for us all to figure out which credit card company is screwing us the hardest – that’s all thanks to a new government initiative designed to bring clarity to the murky world of personal finance.

The info will all be housed within Moneymadeclear, the site launched by the Consumer Financial Education Body in April, and aimed at helping us all to botch our dosh-handling a bit less.

From next year, the government will force all credit card companies to produce electronic statements that will then be uploaded by credit card holders to the Moneymadeclear site.

Then, as if by magic, some computer trickery will allow said customer to compare rates and fees and that, and they will even be informed as to where they can get a better credit card deal. Of course, the customer’s credit card rating probably won’t be healthy enough to enable them to successfully switch but stop being such a grumpy-poops – it sounds like an amazing thing in theory.

A government source said: “It is only right that consumers should have as much information as possible about the products they are using, which they can easily compare with other products to see if they can get a better deal. This is consistent with the key coalition principles of fairness and responsibility, as well as building on our work on transparency.”

See? Amazing! Say ‘thank you’ to the coalition government everyone. SAY IT!

[Independent]