Virgin Media: SO SORRY we fined your dead dad £10 for unpaid bill Virgin Media has apologised after charging a dead man £10 for being unable to pay his broadband bill. The bloke's son-in-law Jim Boyden posted a photo of the demand for the tenner on Facebook, along with an open letter accusing the UK internet provider's staff of a "special kind of meanness". Almost 100,000 people have now …
It's the definition of estate that is the only source of confusion. Most people don't understand what it means. In effect, I haven't "died", I'm still around in the form of my estate. Pretend I'm infirm, and so someone is nominated to take care of my life. That's the estate, and the "executor" of the estate. They won't be paying my bills from their pocket, ever, but they will handle what money and assets I still have left and paying off debts on my behalf. My personal debts, however, do NOT become their personal debts.
Also, if I die leaving a millions pounds of debt, but only half a million pounds to my family, that half-a-million will never go to my family. If it does, it will be pursued and reclaimed. It doesn't matter what my will says that's not my money to bequeath. (This applies to a lot more in wills than you might think - if you attach ANY condition to a sum of money or asset in a will, for example "only if he gets good grades" or "only if he doesn't marry that woman", then the person who would get the money can sue the estate for it, no questions asked, no matter what they have done. Always check with a lawyer.)
So they can pursue the estate, and the person who managed the estate, but they cannot expect even that person to pay them money from their own pocket. It comes from the estate. However, if the executor - or anyone else - was left even a pound in the will, then that pound can be taken from them as it's still technically "mine" and thus still technically owed to whoever I owed it to. Otherwise, "dying" would be a fabulous way to legitimise an awful lot of criminally-obtained money and assets that don't belong to you.
The difficulty then arises from shared properties, etc. My estate might include only half a house (half of a family home, for example). The companies are quite right to pursue the value of that half of the house - even if it means the other owner needing to sell it, or take on half the debt themselves so that they own all the house. Similar things happen with longer term contracts, e.g. cars, phones, etc.
In terms of contracts, technically I might have breached contract, and that might incur a fee on myself, which - because I'm dead - is a debt on the account. However, a late payment fee when you're dead is a bit overzealous. It has to be said that payments don't get much more "late" than that, but there's no way for me to reasonably fulfil that part of the contract upon my death. The fee, therefore, is probably not pursuable. However, my estate would still need to return any phone tied to the contract, outstanding monies, etc. The executors of my estate can't just not pay my bills if there's even a penny left in my estate.
However, unlike many people think, those debts CANNOT be transferred onto other people directly, even the executor, unless there's some kind of major mismanagement of the estate (i.e. fiddling!). If I owe £100, my dad isn't legally required to pay it for me now, and the same is true if either of us dies. The problems stems when people are too keen to distribute the assets and not the debts, because then that involves clawing back inherited assets from people and redistributing them.
Oh, and be careful who you appoint as executor. I know of one person (legally trained) who has been appointed "joint executor" with her arch nemesis (not legally trained) from the other side of the family. That's just ASKING for trouble.
...did he actually inform them?
if not, lets rewrite this:
Automated system not linked to registry office details and therefore fails to realise that someone has died using ESP.
As for the DD message, probebrly unique to that bank and maybe even that type of account. i don't know this bit, just guessing.
The son in law should have just phoned Virgin and they would have waived the late payment and the next months charges.
This is why, when somebody dies an executor takes control. It is their responsibility to inform the likes of Virgin and to pay any outstanding bills from the deceased estate.
Having been in the same situation myself, I can tell you that every single company I contacted, from mobile phone provider to internet provider and more, were extremely helpful and went out of their way so ensure that everything was handled to my satisfaction.
Sorry AC, you are wrong. Have just been through this for my late Father in Law and every company behaved exactly as you state EXCEPT Virgin.
They are virtually impossible to contact. When we finally got through to their Help Desk they were completely unhelpful and on several occasions the line mysteriously went dead during the discussions. They wouldn't even allow us to terminate the account without speaking to the account holder - difficult when he is dead. The bill got inflated month after month after month. Several times they claimed they had stopped all charges - only for even larger charges to appear the following month - coupled with a complete denial of the previous agreement.
The only satisfying outcome is that all members of our family have since ceased all dealings with Virgin and I personally wil NEVER buy anything from them. They are a disgrace - the sooner the World is rid of the cancer that is Virgin Media the better.
"This is why, when somebody dies an executor takes control. It is their responsibility to inform the likes of Virgin and to pay any outstanding bills from the deceased estate."
I don't believe that is the case. In Australia, Executors are required to " advertise in newspapers and the Government Gazette calling for creditors having claims against the estate to give notice of the claim within two months".
If Virgin does not contact the executor and misses the notice, they have no claim. Of course, it may be different in the UK, but much of Australian law is still based on UK law
California has a similar law, and I would guess that most states have something along that line. When my MIL passed, she had very few bills, and we had enough cash from her accounts to pay them off. The only bill we got as a result of the legal notice was a bill from Medi-Cal, for care my FIL had received some years previously. It had been "suspended" until Mom passed, then we got hit for $11,000 from Medi-Cal... Got a far bigger bill from our attorney fighting my wife's neices, who were determined to break Mom's wills (two of them) to get half the estate. The two wills left everything to my wife, and didn't mention the neices at all... Trouble was, Mom didn't have a lawyer write either of the wills (one was on the State Bar statutory will form, the other was handwritten, which is legal in California). Cost us over $20,000 in legal fees, which we got back later from the estate, and we're no longer talking to the b**ch neices...
They did not know that the customer was dead. The refusal message ("D.D Denied-Payer deceased") is not a death notification. The message does not mean anything and would never even have been seen by a human.
It was the responsibility of the executor (son-in-law) to inform Virgin of the death.
Bull!
I work on coupling systems between banks, insurance companies and brokers. At least in this country (not the UK) there are ways of doing this. Yes, messages contain a human readable text message, but they also contain status numbers - which relate to the explicit reason why the message has been generated.
Most messages get processed automatically. Some create tasks in the CRM people for customer service people to deal with manually when it can't be dealt with automatically.
Simply announcing that this is an automated message and so there is nothing a company can do about it is what makes people hate the IT industry so much! Blame the people making the tools, don't use the tools as an excuse!
> Yes, messages contain a human readable text message, but they also contain status numbers - which relate to the explicit reason why the message has been generated.
And in this case the response code would have been 146 which means DD Setup is in disabled mode.
Perhaps the protocol you use has a vast array of return codes including one that means "the customer is dead", but the ones I'm familiar with only have a couple of generic failure codes with a textual information field.
Besides that, the bank isn't an authority source for who is alive or dead and a company should require more than a text field in a DD refusal before it believes they are dead and suspends all of their services.
The responses we use have 1 to 1 id to description field, so yes something that distinct should be caught (IMHO).
The bank should not be a source of information, but...
If the company cares about customer service then they should have checks and controls in place to ensure that automated responses do not cause this type of distress. This is not a standard payment declined message and even if it is one ID with multiple messages the message broker should pick up something this sensitive to create a task for a real person to look at in more detail. If not all messages were known when creating the message broker (but ug why not!!!!) then I could live with it happening once.
There is *no* excuse for blaming computers in this type of thing unless that blame is along the lines of 'Sorry, we screwed up royally when making our system and our internal team are busy looking into how we can ensure this never happens again"
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"Until consumers use the weapon of choice to hold these providers to higher standards of behaviour, then they (we) will continue to be shafted with near-criminal fines/charges, and p1ss-poor customer service. Ala Energy, Water, Mobile Phones etc. etc."
When all of these companies are as bad as each other with their 7 pages of terms and conditions in miniscule font size, and their faceless automated "customer service" systems, and their cartel like shared monopolies on these markets; other than doing away with gas, electricity, water, telecoms completely and effectively going to live in a field... exactly which weapon of "choice" is it that you think you have?
but it was before facebook.
In our case it was because of using minimum wage school dropouts to do the tedious task of compiling letters about tax, they would happily just paste in the account header, which ended up as 'Dear Joe Bloggs - Deceased' without a care in the world. You couldn't even properly reprimand them when it came back as a complaint, as they didn't give a toss about the job.
If he died in a hospice he was presumably living there (and not at home) - so wouldn't he have cancelled his broadband anyway when he moved out? or was the son living in the house using the VM services? Dunno.
Either way I can see how this thing can happen with an automated system, and think that a call to VM would have sufficed to get it sorted. The action seems a bit to 'publicity hungry' for me.
Actually when I moved house I've found BT so easy to cancel, even within contract periods...
I told them I am moving, they said OK do you want ot move your service?
No, I don't have a BT line where I am moving, they said OK and canceled service with no charges from the date I moved out....
The worst thing about BT is their damned Indian call centers, getting better now the employees have experience, but still, can barely understand them!
Virgin Media in poor Customer Service scandal?
Why does this not surprise me in the least.
The only scandal I can see is why people continue to persist in using Branson's cable service, knowing that they subscribe to the "customer is always wrong" school of customer service.
This is a pretty big fail on whomever set up/designed the automated billing system - the DD responses are standard (although I am maybe 8 years out of date on last working on a system): https://datacash.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/471/~/addacs,-auddis-and-arudd-reason-codes
It SHOULDN'T have been tough to have dealt with this.
So they have a team who intercede in these cases?
Bah!
In my day we used to code Cobol programs wi' conditional clause t' spot that sort o' thing an' deal wi' it proper like. This is what you get when y'use languages intended fer writin systems software in instead o' a proper data processin' wun.
Kids! Tch!
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Was executor of my late father and contacted BT to inform them of his death and the fact he would no longer be needing his telephone.
The would not talk to me cos I was not the account holder, so I sent them a death certificate and informed them I was the executor....they would still not speak to me cos i was not the account holder.
I sent a letter telling them to get in touch if he owed any money and to make a claim on his estate. No response.
During this time, there were letters kept being sent to him that he owed money and the matter was being put in the hands of collection agencies. Each time I sent a letter re-itterating that he was dead and to send me any claims in the estate.
After I had wound up the estate I got a letter telling me that money was owed for the period after he died and that I was now responsible. I told them they had failed to make a claim on the estate within the required timescale and to take the matter to court if they wanted to.
Never heard back.
These things come from a small set of bank systems.
They've seen this kind of thing happen before - so why not map all DD messages, only ones you haven't seen before need a human interaction. That would be busy work for a few hours (to look at the historical values) and then only need to deal with exceptions...
Presumably VM customers are dying at a regular rate and unpaid DDs are being generated by the deceased's banks for a proportion of these deaths, so why isn't this a regular event? Something that should be a routine bit of processing suddenly errors but apparently only for this one individual case? Sounds to me as though something happened during processing and something that ordinarily would be trapped and dealt with appropriately slipped through.
I hold no brief for companies like VM, but punters who instantly turn to social media to prove how inhuman these companies are when it comes to dealing with deceased customers, they lose my vote straight away they do.
Like Al Murray often says, #NotNews
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