Incompetence, or Fraud?

[srchild]

Following significant downtime for my website hosting I cancelled my Eukhost subscription last February. There can be no disputing that my account was cancelled - I received a refund from the billing department.

Unheralded on 11/12/07 I receive an invoice for £2880.

This is a notice that your invoice 26193 has been generated for services by Eukhost.com on 2007/12/11.Please login into your Billing Account and pay the invoice online as we dont save your Credit Card details in our database and payment has to be made using the "Pay Online" option from the due invoice.

Trying to be helpful, rather than ignoring it I contact billing and explain, and receive the following reply from Sharron at customer support:

We have removed this invoice and canceled the package from our billing system hence you wont be receiving any notifications in future.

So far so good.

I receive further invoice for £2,880 on 13/12, with a different invoice number.

This is a notice that your invoice 26340 has been generated for services by Eukhost.com on 2007/12/13.Please login into your Billing Account and pay the invoice online as we dont save your Credit Card details in our database and payment has to be made using the "Pay Online" option from the due invoice.

I think you will forgive that, not having been a customer for the last ten months, and a dissatisfied one then, and having a recent communication from billing dept acknowledging cancellation, I ignore this new invoice.

Today I receive this:

This is a notice that your invoice 26340 has been generated for services by Eukhost.com on 2007/12/22.Please login into your Billing Account and pay the invoice online as we dont save your Credit Card details in our database and payment has to be made using the "Pay Online" option from the due invoice.

Now this must be either:

• Gross incompetence in the Billing Dept (invoicing an ex-customer, then after being notified and cancelling this invoice, raising yet another invoice), or
• Attempted Fraud (serving invoices known to be invalid in the hope that they get processed accidentally).

Could somebody please advise me which?

There is one good thing here, the statement:

we dont save your Credit Card details in our database

Excellent news! Thank goodness you don't have my credit card details on file or you would surely by now have debited my card at least once without any justification.

Folks, do not give these people permission to hold your credit card details.

[Ben]

This has happened to me before and it isn't as such a big deal as it can be rectified quite easily. This can happen regardless if they did cancel it because of an unavoidable error with the billing software they use. eUKhost are certainly not fraudsters and if you contact them directly they will reply within 15 minutes and will rectify the issue for you. You can contact the billing department now at billing@eukhost.com and they will sort the problem out for you immediately.

[eUKhost.com]

Hello Simon,

I do agree that this was a mistake from our side and Sharron should have deleted your billing account but it seems that you didn't read the invoice reminder. It is clearly mentioned in the invoice notification that we don't save your credit cards and you have to pay online only.

There is no need for you to come and post such thread when you never got billed for anything. As you have mentioned that you got refund for remaining term so this clarifies how genuine eUKhost is. You could have submitted a ticket for our billing department to look into this rather than tagging eUKhost as fraudsters. Fraud company wont issue any sort of refunds but they will keep on charging your card, has eUKhost done anything similar to you ???????????????

URL :- 10/10

Was this someone else ?

[DPS Computing]

Incompetence - No.

Fraud - No (fraud is where you are promised something or offered something in return for a payment you have made and you never recieve the promised thing or it is significantly different from that described. Fraudsters don't normally last 6 years either - they normally start many different businesses and shut them down at regular intervals to evade capture. Also in this country Companies House don't let business stay limited companies if they are commiting fraud!).

Human Error - Quite possibly. eUKhost may sell space on machines or in some cases entire machines to customers. However do remember that the people running eUKhost are humans! Humans sometimes make mistakes - I have to say that this mistake seems extremely minor. Yes you shouldn't have been invoiced but what has actually happened to your detrement due to this invoice? OK , a few lost seconds due to reading a couple of reminders but apart from that?

eUKhost has a large customer base and an even larger amount of accounts to manage. The fact that there arn't more problems is the surprising thing with so many possible things that can go wrong with technology.

[jc8654]

I agree with all of what David has just said. Billing systems have a tendency to do things of their own accord. I know mine does odd things occasionally, particularly with invoices as they're generated using cron jobs. If someone has not made the 100% correct change to your account, the system will automatically bill you even if the error has been changed before hand.

In this case, there has been no fraudulent activity taking place. No money has changed hands and as such, fraud cannot take place. If we now take for example mobile phone companies who charge you for items you haven't used and then take the money from your account, that could be classed as fraud except you get a refund on your next bill. So in this case, I can safely say, there is nothing illegal taking place and it is simply unfortunate this has happened.

[paul]

Eukhost is values-based & reputed organization committed to fosters a customer-driven culture based on trust & belief, The thread seems just misleading to me, I don't think such thread should be existed in our community forum.

[DPS Computing]

I'm glad to see that this matter has been throughly dealt with and seems to have reached its conclusion .