the dark side of contracting electricity and gas over the phone

The entry of autumn into our lives always also implies a progressive drop in temperatures and a reduction in daylight hours. This causes us to spend more time at home and, therefore, make greater use of basic supplies.

This is, therefore, a good time to monitor the market and decide if it is convenient for us to change our current electricity and gas rates for others that are more advantageous for our personal finances. Changing companies will almost always bring us benefits.

The problem arises when the Telephone contracting is carried out at the initiative of the marketing company -the one that sells the electricity that circulates through that network-, who “makes it difficult to know basic details such as the duration of the discount, the application of annual surcharges or the extra costs for adjustment services”, has denounced the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU).

This group has warned of the lack of information and traps that hide many of the telephone offers that consumers receive to contract a new electricity or gas rate.

“Bad commercial practices in electricity contracting are the order of the day. It’s not a secret, the authorities know it. But while they take measures to eradicate them, you have to be careful not to discover that you have contracted a much more expensive electricity rate than the one you had without realizing it,” the OCU has assured.

The organization has explained that one of the most common tricks that companies use is to offer attractive discounts that “They actually hide a very high price that will be activated automatically once the promotion endswithout the need for any notice.” In addition, “there are more and more offers that do not include a commitment to maintain the price or the term is very short (one quarter, six months…).”

Another additional charge that the consumer does not take into account when preparing to contract the new one is the CPI: “It is never indicated over the phone. But There are many contracts that update prices with the annual CPI on January 1including tolls and charges that already change based on their own review system.”

Finally, it is also common during telephone contracting that when offering the kilowatt-hour (kWh) cost is not done with precision, since “the price of the fixed term is not reported and not all decimals are given”, so, in reality, “an announced price of €0.11/kWh, which is actually €0.11999/kWh, hides an annual extra cost of 45 euros.”

Be careful with SMS: “You are changing companies”

An issue that also worries the OCU is the abuses that it has already reported to the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) after detecting it in “energy advisors”, consultancies and outsourced call centers and which consists of deceive the consumer by posing as its marketer so that they respond “to an SMS that supposedly offers a juicy discount, when in reality you are changing companies.”

“Many of these intermediaries have so much personal data of the client – sometimes even the bank account or the CUPS number of the contract – that It’s hard not to distrust their bad business practices.“, assures this group that defends consumer rights, which also detected a “lack of transparency” by not providing “basic information about the conditions of the alleged offer or the identity of the marketer.”

The OCU now hopes that the new regulation “prohibit making gas and electricity contracts by telephoneexcept when they are initiated at the client’s will, not by an unsolicited call from a salesperson.”

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