Calor Gas - Claiming deposit was never paid

-Al-

We moved into an apartment just over 2 years ago which had a calor gas supply. When we got our new tenant paper work to sign up we seen that we had to pay a €250 deposit. Thinking this was a bit steep I rang to see if going on direct debit could bypass the need to pay this (as it is with electric ireland). I was pretty rudely informed that this wasnt possible and that I basically had no choice but to pay it.

Fast forward to May of this year and we moved out of the property and closed our account. We were informed that our deposit would cover our final bill and the account was left in credit of €13 odd euro.

A few days later we received a letter saying that the account was closed and we owed them money. Made some calls - First call they said they would look in to it and that the deposit paid button on the account was ticked so was probably an admin error.

They contact us again to say payment pending, so second call and they advised us that they had no record of our deposit being paid (contrary to first call) and even though I was advised that we had no choice but to pay it - and we were never notified in all 2 years of service that we hadn't paid it. When this was explained to them they said "oh sometimes accounts with no deposits paid get through the cracks and dont get suspended" - crazy response from a customer service rep!!

We have checked our bank accounts and can see that 2 days after moving into apartment €250 was withdrawn from an ATM - no other purchases were made for that amount as were on a pretty tight speding. We can only assume that the payment was lodged at the post office but we have no concrete proof to show them that this went to them. I dont keep receipts for more than a few weeks as generally if there is any issue it would show itself in that time.

We received another letter on friday (a notice to cut off our service and payment must be made within 7 days) the letter says that they will pursue legal action if there is non payment.

What is funny is that during our time in the house we would get monthly notices for a previous tenant that were also seeking unpaid bills...we actually thought that they had applied our desposit to the previous tenants account but in hindsight I wonder is this an ongoing occurance with calor "losing" desposits.

To sum up all that, we wont be paying them a penny as I know we have paid this to them. If they have internal issues it isnt my problem.

Problem is I dont know what we should do if they pursue this, will they take court action or damage our credit rating? Because we dont have a receipt of payment or a bank record showing money being transferred to their account we are left having to prove ourselves right.

Grab All Association

Calor have no write access to your credit history. Only banks/finance houses, credit unions and credit card issuers (mbna, Tesco) see www.icb.ie

Calor could take you to court but anything under €1k isn't really worth it and they'll just sell the debt off for 5-10% to a debt collector.

Debt collectors will just bombard you with draft summonses and final demand letters to try scare you into paying.