It's sad how many apparently legitimate businesses have departments that in effect only exist to defraud customers.
The two times it's happened to me I only got anywhere when I was blunt and gave them an ultimatum.
First was Eon who tried to hang on to thousands of pounds of faulty metered electric.
1st call the operative claimed I was owed nothing and the meter reader had no right to tell me the meter was faulty. She was almost frothing about the meter reader bit.
2nd call operative, after I explained I was unhappy with first "I don't know why you were told that, we can offer you £50"
3rd call, same procedure " I don't know why they told you that"....
4th call, put through to the head honcho in the defrauding department. Same old blather. Given a few "I can offer...but you have to agree right now". He'd phone me while I was working and we'd argue for an hour at a time. I had 3 or 4 of these calls. All the time telling me stuff like they could only refund for months when my knackered cheap rate switch over thing hadn't registered any units and there were lots of months where it had registered 0.1 units! Also that it was impossible to check back further than 2 years as they didn't keep records. By now, with the hours this chap was putting in to my case I was pretty sure they must owe me a good wedge, but no way of proving it.
Last call I put it to him, citing all the "I don't know why you were told that" events that either everyone in his department was totally incompetent or set up to defraud their customers. Which is it? No reply. "I cannot believe that you are all incompetent, or you'd have been sacked, so you're defrauding people and from my own experience you are probably very successful at it. You have today to make a proper evidenced offer of compensation before I call the police. I have notes of times and contents of all our conversations and I know you have recorded them." I didn't really.
Low and behold 30 minutes later I got an email with copies of the previous ten years of bills, a spreadsheet of all the corrections to make it right and they had transferred £3500 into my account. I still think they cheated me.
Next was T-Mobile via a debt collection agency.
I've never had a T-Mobile anything ever. Lots of letters threatening court action for years of unpaid bills for a contract supplied with a posh phone sent to somewhere in London. No point calling the scum debt collectors, best not to EVER reply to such as then they know you're there.
T-Mobile - it's out of our hands, the debts were all sold to ***
But I have never had any contract with you, last lived in London 40 years ago and although the threatening letters are addressed to me, the name on your imaginary contract has only the first letter in common!
It's out of our hands.
You set these wolves on me, you call them off, this is nothing to do with me and you know it. Did you know your debt collectors behaved like this? Seems to me like a mass mailing of threatening letters fishing for mugs who'll be frightened enough to stump up. Sort it or you'll drown in the fuss I will make. I have an investigative journalist friend who writes for the Times who'd be fascinated (that was a lie). I had a copy of the Times and picked a suitable name.
Sorted.
The point is that we're all warned of nasty foreigners scamming us but really everyone should be warned about these so-called legitimate businesses. They all rely on coercing you to voluntarily stump up money you don't owe, or agree to a tiny percentage of money they owe you. Eon have a room full of people who's job is just this, I spoke to at least 5 different people before friendly reasonable defrauding Sam, the boss.They are really good at it too, the Eon debacle stretched over about 3 months.