Issues with AGL's billing, meter reading, & customer service

Im really fed up with getting bills from AGL energy when i dont even have an account ive received several of these but just thrown them out.But so much for my privacy and want to know if it is a scam or what it is because it has there symbol located which ive seem before. Im not sure choice what i can do about this if i keep receiving letters Im sure its been happening about a year or so.?

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Ignoring a bona fide bill can be at your peril. When did you start receiving these bills? Did you move into a new home and set up your own accounts? Maybe the previous occupant never cancelled their AGL account so your address remains on their records as a customer, and even if they did AGL is not renowned for good record keeping (I would never do business with them again, from a bad personal experience).

You can easily confirm whether the contact details on the bill are AGL or not, or a marketing company, or a scammer, and if it is AGL you would be well served to contact them to find out why you are getting bills, terminate any account they think you might have had, and have it stopped. Keep copious notes of who and when you talk to them and ask for written/email confirmation of what they have done in response to your contact. They might ā€œforgetā€ to send you that confirmation so you could need to keep after them, and after a time or two complain to your state utility regulator.

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hello @passerbye123

Please have a look at

This topic is covered in great detail there.

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I never got any type of bill before its only been recently from AGL in future ill keep the bill and contact them.

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If it is a recent occurrence, beware about the scams @meltam referenced. If the contact details are not actually AGL it will be a scammer and put it in the rubbish as you have been doing.

Cheers,

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Thats what i did i threw it out thank you for the advice. You neer know who to trust now adays so many scams around.

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I had have some bad experience with AGLā€™s billing. I had been paying by bill for months and then I got two bills. The second bill was addressed to ā€œthe Occupantā€ of my unit and the the bill I have been paying had my name.

Then after comparing those only I noticed that I they had linked the wrong meter to me. Essentially I had been paying someone else bill for four months. Then it took me more than 15 phone calls to different people explaining the same story to every person on the phone to get it rectified.

Donā€™t use AGL. Their support is terrible and contact center people are not that easy to deal with.

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Some customers might be happy with AGL or perhaps prefer the devil they know. Otherwise AGL retail would be out of business.

My two experiences of AGL are uniformly bad. I am lucky to be in Victoria where I can choose retailers and I avoid AGL.

My first experience was in NSW where I had a small apartment for work trips. AGL had a monopoly for supplying electricity to the property. I called to get a final reading as I had sold the property. My previous bill was for up to date apart from a week or so when the place was empty. All the previous bills had come to my home in Melbourne where I live. I expected to get a bill for around $10 or less. I did not get a final bill so I thought AGL had just written it off as it was too small to invoice. About three years later, I began to get calls from Dun & Bradstreet who had purchased a debt from AGL. The debt was for $137 plus an AGL imposed $15 late fee or $152. Apparently, AGL had not closed my account but kept it going until the new occupants applied to have their electricity connected. So I had been charged for their usage during the renovations. D&B had already default listed me. It took me about six months and the intervention of the Privacy Commissioner to get AGL to cancel the invoice and recall the debt and remove the default. Not Happy #01

My second experience was when I purchased an dilapidated property where I wanted to build two townhouses to sell. I had to get the gas and electricity removed to allow demolition. I couldnā€™t deal directly with the distributors and they referred me to AGL who had the ā€œbilling rightsā€ for the property. I gave them my home address and they sent me a bunch of paperwork to my home to fill out which I did. I got the bill for the removal of the electricity and paid that. I did not get a bill for the removal of the gas so I rang AGL after about three months. They checked my address and told me the bill had not issued yet. So I forgot all about it. Again, about three years later, the D&B call centre rings me to say they have tracked me down as the former owner of the property and there was a bill for $173 (?) for gas usage. I told them I had not used gas as I had the meter removed. I remembered I had not received a bill for the meter removal. I asked them to check. They did not get back to me but I got increasingly offensive letters so I rang AGL who told me the debt had been sold and I had to deal with D&B. Again, I had to call the Privacy Ombudsman who investigated. AGL had sent the gas meter removal invoice to ā€œThe Occupierā€ at the address where the house had been demolished and there was no letter box. When the debt was sold to D&B, they had done a property search and found I was the owner so they started sending me demands. Suffice to say, the default listing was removed. the debt was recalled and I did not have to pay them. I even got an apology from AGL for this monumental stuff-up.

Summary: when AGL stuffs up, it stuffs up big!

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Sounds like youā€™ve had a bad run @gds, I really feel your pain with not receiving bills too. We had a similar situation in our household, where we share bills (and use separate suppliers for gas and electricity).

We went FIVE years without receiving a bill from AGL. With each person in the household thinking the other had it covered, it was forgotten long ago until we received a letter addressed to ā€˜The Occupantā€™. As with the original posts, I was wary that this could be a scam but wanted to call AGL to confirm, so I found the number online and gave them a call. As it turned out, we did have an account with a fairly sizable balance owing.

There were a few ways we could have gone with this, and I did give the ombudsmen a call out of interest. Unfortunately, I was told it would be up to me to prove I hadnā€™t received the bills, and I was also told some incorrect information about the legislated requirements when it comes to billing. I would like to note I have also had positive experiences with ombudsmen services too, just not in this case. There are always human elements in these systems to consider.

Personally speaking, thereā€™s obviously some serious systematic failures occurring with AGL, at least at a customer level. For example, after not receiving payment for say 12 months, I would think it prudent to cut off supply. In my case this would have been preferable to a large bill, despite the minor annoyances this may have caused.

Of course, we could have pushed this issue. However, to be fair to AGL as well, we had used the gas and there was some confusion on our part that had contributed to the situation. There were also no debt collectors involved yet and credit ratings are not an issue. So we paid the bill, and promptly switched to another provider. Iā€™m hopeful that the new provider has better practices, but I also see firsthand that you can have trouble with any gas supplier.

Iā€™m lucky to be involved with an organisation working on initiatives that may one day help solve these problems, like with our new service Powerup that is currently looking at a new way to buy electricity. Perhaps weā€™ll be able to look at gas next.

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That was a teaser @brendanmays :slight_smile:

Is Powerup also going to monitor that bills are received, just in case :laughing:

More seriously I am actually curious how Powerupā€™s supply bills will be managed and paid since the supplier can be changed regularly. Do bills go to the customer for payment, and if so how does the customer know what to expect, from whom, and when? or is billing and payment somehow integral to Powerup?

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Hi @PhilT,
Powerup will be monitoring bills from the retailers, we set ourselves up as an intermediary. Energy consumption data will also be analysed each billing cycle and an assessment made on whether to switch the customer again. Payment requirements vary a fair bit between energy retailers so during the trial we will be assessing the best way of managing payments. It is important on most contracts for consumers to pay on time to get discounts so we will be monitoring this closely.

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This agl company cant someone stop them god sake maybe if we all go there and protest about them. the amount of people i have heard about even on here that have been totally ripped off its a disgrace. Why that accc cant investigate them or choice do more getting beyond the joke it is. i have never paid a bill of theirs and never will. never had a account.

We have moved house 3 times in last 5 years and i have found at the new premises, the provider of the last tenant will claim that you are their customer, even if you have arranged with another service provider, and any usage will be charged to you and even and they deem it to be a minimum amount. Your new provider starts not on day you move in but when the meter is read, apparently by an industry reader who will inform the new provider who has listed the property on their site. And to get rid of previous provider of last Renters tell them to contact the Estate Agents or send letter to the Energy ombudsman their letters cease then.

Bona fide Online AGL accounts come from the email address agl@energy.agl.com.au . The fake AGL accounts you get in emails come from oddly named email accounts. You need to check the email address. I have received many fake accounts, often for huge amounts, so that in itself always rings a bell. BUt your best bet: click on the email address of the sender.

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Hi there just to let you know I received the bill in the mail i suppose i got about 3 bills only been no longer than about a year ok. before that i never received anything from them. I dont have gas where i live anyway and never had electricity with them either. I live in nsw or sydney area just dont know why i started getting the m in my mail just over 10 years i have lived here never got a single bill until last year part way through 2016.

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After i paid my gas bill, i thought i will check with agl about the reason for the high amount. I used chat on a saturday night, the person on chat, said that there was a mistake and asked to check the gas meter and let him know. He the asked me to provide him with my account and bsb so he can refund me the money. As it was on chat, i did not think it was safe, he advised me to call agl and ask for refund. when i contacted AGL , they said they did not have a record of the refund, but had a record of my conversation.

Has this happened to anyone else? They treated me like i was making it up. Beware of the chat service on AGL.

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Not w/chat, but a few years ago AGL refused to honour their own written correspondence to me. Seems common for them. As a result I moved on and would not do business with them in another 2 lifetimes. From various internet gripes about AGL your experience does not sound unusual. Google ā€˜AGL billing problemsā€™ and have a look at AGL on productreview.com.au. That site will often attract more unhappy than happy customers for services, but.

start.edit: a possible test for the veracity of both good and bad posts on productreview is how many reviews the poster made. If they only ever made the 1 review consider motivation. If many good (or bad) reviews came all at once that can be suspicious too. Whilst they claim to assure against bogus reviews each of us can scan them and form a considered opinion. Some products/companies look pretty straight, and some are so uniquely out of character with their peers one has to wonder why. end.edit

So, did you send your chat transcript, did they accept the chat made the right call and you are due the refund, and did they process your refund? If no, next time you ring them start by asking for complaints and see how you go, and if they refuse ask for customer retention (by whatever name), and if they are still providing you with ā€˜AGL top serviceā€™ my recommendation would be to ā€˜walkā€™ to another supplier who does not jerk their customers around. There must be one, surely there must be :wink:

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Hi Everyone,

New to this forum. So, not sure if Iā€™m in the right place or not.

Interested to read some feedback from anyone who has previously been with AGL Gas and switched to another provider. Iā€™m getting a bit tired of the aforementioned companyā€™s constant use of ā€œestimatedā€ monthly accounts - most of which seem to result in utterly inaccurate and wildly excessive amounts. Over the past year Iā€™ve received eight bills that were based on GUESS- TI - MATES and just four that were based on actual readings.

The meter has always been in the same location - in the front of my unit with easy, unrestricted accessā€¦ no security gates, no dogs, no vehicles parked in front of it ā€¦ no excuses ā€¦ basically !

The latest estimated bill was, apparently, based on the amount that was charged during the same period last year. Only problem is that, this time around, it is $200 compared to $100 that was applied last year - impossible, considering that Iā€™m not using the gas heater AT ALL this winter !!

Have called AGL on two occasions. Needless to say, itā€™s like trying to talk to someone under water. The customer service operators seem to have little, if any, reasonable answers to offer.

The company (and / or their contractors) seems to use some highly questionable methods of operation i.e. doing ā€œactualā€ readingsā€™ at the beginning of billing periods and ā€œestimatesā€ at the end of the period. Whatā€™s the point in that ? Surely, all thatā€™s needed is an actual, physical reading at the end of the period and the information recorded off the meter should be the amount thatā€™s billed to the customer.

A meter reader was here last week. However, when I contacted AGL today, I was advised that the next account will also be based on an estimate ! So that will make FOUR estimated bills in a row.

Also, of concern, is the fact that the 'Supply Address" on my bill has now been changed, for no apparent reason, to the address of adjoining property i.e. the house thatā€™s next door to these units that I live in. As I said to the operatorā€¦ I just hope that Iā€™m not getting someone elseā€™s bill .They gave me some long winded yarn about the meter reader changing the address for "administrative / grid (?) related reasons ā€¦ or some such clap trap. And, apparently, itā€™s ā€œtoo difficultā€ to fix.

The privatization shambles has been a nightmare

Hoping to find another supplier who has a more straightforward and reliable billing process.

Thanks

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Youā€™re in the right spot @baysider. Maybe our @Consumer-Campaigner group has someone willing to offer their experience?

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Umm, why did I recieve an email about this topic? I think someone has misspelt their Gmail email addressā€¦