Switching Broadband without consent

[Craig_a86]

Hi,

I’m really looking for some help here, my parents have been targeted for many years now, by someone maliciously using switching services to change their utilities and particularly their internet.  As all that is needed is and address and a name, this is very easy to do, BT are generally good at cancelling the order but in many instances the company the order was placed with are very difficult to deal with or refuse to cancel the order as we do not have the details of who the request was made by, even though they are requesting it for my parents account.  

Is there anything further that can be done to assist or stop this taking place as my parents are elderly and the stress of regularly dealing with this is getting too much for them.  

It’s very difficult to get through the correct people and other than waiting for it to happen again and then dealing with it for several days and many hours to stop the switching of the service there doesn’t seem to be any help, anything at all would be much  appreciated. 

Police are involved and an open harassment case is active, but not much they can do. Action fraud has been spoken to and as they have not ‘lost’ or had physical money ‘stolen’ it’s not technically fraud.

Thanks

[NeilO]

Hi @Craig_a86 Welcome to the community and thanks for posting. I'm so sorry to see your parent's BT services are being switched without their consent, I appreciate the distress this must be causing them.

I'm sorry BT can't stop these requests from being made or put measures in place to block them as there are Ofcom rules in place to make it easy to change suppliers.

The process means the switch is gaining provider led, and the losing provider sends a notification to the customer to let them know that a transfer request has been received. The losing provider can only cancel the switch when instructed to do so by their customer but they can't block another provider from placing the order.

Thanks

Neil

[Craig_a86]

What we are finding is that we are informing the losing provider to cancel the switch, which they attempt.  The gaining provider in turn speak to the person pretending to be my parents who tells them that the switch is in fact correct.  

Calling the gaining provider, is difficult as they don’t have the account details, even though it’s them who they are pretending to be. 

Is very frustrating, obviously all they want to do, is to lock their accounts down and not allow anything to happen without them contacting their existing provider first. 

[rbz5416]

You can't just switch an account without placing an order with a new provider. I can't see how you could do that without providing payment details, which at the very least would need to be verified & probably credit checked. So if the police are involved surely they can access the account details being used? Unless whoever is doing this also has access to your parents payment details.

[Craig_a86]

I believe it will only get to the stage were money comes out of an account after the switch happens, which would then fail etc.  

Police have case open, however are essentially not investigating and only adding each incident to the open file. 

[rbz5416]

Maybe contact Ofcom & see what they can suggest, given that it's their rules that are allowing this.