I agree. Never give up or they’ll continue to ignore their customers. I pursued Princess cruise lines for many months because they refused to acknowledge me or act upon my complaints. If I’d given up I wouldn’t have received the thousands of dollars in compensation I eventually received.
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Never give up! Never surrender!
You may now return to the scheduled program.
I have an analogous problem with mail addressing from large organisations who employ software to fix “incorrect” addresses and bureaus to do enveloping and mailing. For some of them no matter how many times they manually set the address the system keeps overriding. Your situation is worse as it involves money not just lost mail (although that could involve money sometimes) and the system behaviour is clearly an error contrary to spec. In my case one could be generous and say that my situation is out of scope as they may have never imagined it.
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We are veering off topic but you could try talking to Australia Post, if their master file is what “large organisations” or “bureaus” are using to fix “incorrect” addresses.
Yes. The aspect that is out of scope in the system design is allowing for the fact that in the real world mail is not necessarily delivered according to that masterfile and that a manual override is needed. The situation is incurable as ozpost will not move postcode boundaries to match how deliveries are done nor ensure that their deliveries are done according to the postcode.
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Why doesn’t that surprise me.
I closed my Optus mobile account with Optus in May 2018 and received a Final Bill, advising I am $1.17 in credit. Every month I get another email telling me I still have $1.17 credit. They took the monthly payments out through Visa, I don’t know why they didn’t re-credit the amount the same way. I wait for the day some human realises what’s going on. Maybe I’ll get a cheque in the mail one day.
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The only way to stop that might be to ring them and ask for the credit. That dollar in their pocket multiplied by the number of customers that might be in a similar situation adds up with a bit of interest flowing each year. Optus would not be alone in how they treat ‘abandoned’ credits (as they see them) being carried along forever. Some companies will eventually send an email that due to lack of account activity they are instituting a monthly fee to take it to zero, and others will just advise they have rounded it to zero. Complaints work to retrieve the small amounts, sometimes requiring escalation.
As often as not it is a disconnect of the billing systems from the account keeping systems. eg bad IT, or worse, management that is happy for this to happen, not saying they are.
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Telstra is no different.
When I closed a Telstra Business account some years back there was a small credit of a few dollars. Probably of less value than the cost of printing, mailing and processing the cheque! No other option. It took three months of persistence to finally get Telstra to send a cheque to close the account.
Telstra did everything to encourage me to have the balance credited to a personal or other business account. I did wonder if despite the reluctance of the system to issue a cheque for the balance, transferring a credit to a legally unrelated entity would be any less difficult within their system?
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I wonder how many people had similar additional bills and just paid them? Optus could be making a fortune from this.
We had a similar situation with multiple bills over many months after our internet was disconnected. Each time I called and they reassured me that we didn’t need to pay and would get no more bills. It was a frustrating process that was ultimately resolved (though I’ve kept all the records of these conversations just in case they start again). If we had just paid these without thinking we’d be hundreds of dollars out of pocket.
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Just let them keep posting them out as it will cost them many times more than $1.17 for the postage.
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Update so far:
We still have no explanation nor reassurance from Optus; we keep contacting them but at this stage feel TIO action is our best bet (per their instructions if Optus has not resolved it within a certain timeframe, pending…)
Our bank (HSBC) has also, disappointingly, been fairly useless.
Failed to respond to our written request to cancel the direct debit (secure message with online banking site) in their stated 2 working days; failed to respond to our query as to why no response; then during a protracted and circular phone conversation last night, variously claimed that:
- they couldn’t see our secure message
- didn’t understand what we wanted
- that they couldn’t act on our reissued verbal instruction last night for several days because the back office is short-staffed and/or customer service had to email another department to enact it
- they could not confirm the cancellation in writing via the same secure messaging system through which they send all kinds of other messages
- that perhaps they hadn’t received our message with the cancellation instruction because we logged on via password rather than using our little widget ‘secure key’ devices (which are required for some banking functions)
- a supervisor was not ‘around’ but then miraculously appeared when we suggested we would write a complaint (by the way, on the HSBC banking website there is a link to ‘how to complain’ which goes to a different page with no mention of complaints…)
We concluded by requesting a written confirmation that the direct debit had been cancelled by the close of business the next day, or that we would be seeking a better bank.
IF we get the direct debit cancelled then the Optus problem will go away, and I think we have some homework to do after Christmas to find a new bank.
Anyone got a great fee-free, well-functioning, online, with good on-shore customer service bank they’d care to recommend?!
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Check ING Orange (+ Maximiser). Not perfect but their perks if one plays ‘the game’ are very good, especially for international travellers 
It seems you should have a word about HSBC to AFCA the industry sponsored ombudsman tasked with making complaints go away, and APRA the government agency that is tasked to regulate and oversee our banks, although the RC puts the latter into some suspicion.
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Similarly to what Richard Pryor demonstrates with his salami slicing in the documentary Superman III.
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Thank you BBG! ING is already under consideration but good to have a recommendation from such a respected source 
We are indeed ‘game players’; I believe the marketing industry would class us as pesky ‘opportunistic exploiters’ and it’s a game that requires a degree of commitment but worth the rewards if played well 
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PS BBG, I like the new avatar! Go Indy!
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And thank you for suggesting the more formal complaint mechanisms, although I doubt the off-shore customer ‘service’ staff are likely to be aware of what this means, so probably won’t achieve much mentioning it to them… This is one reason I’d prefer my next bank not to have an off-shore support service.
If we don’t get the result we have asked for in a reasonable timeframe we will pursue these avenues.
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I had the same problem with Telstra. Eventually got my few dollars paid out. Yay!
Good question. I don’t know. Maybe there is some exemption. It would at least be commonsense (which unfortunately is not very common).
My suggestion would be to avoid direct debit. It means a little more hassle for you on an ongoing basis but much greater certainty for you when you cease dealing with the provider (in this case Optus).
I expect that one day you will be able to do “direct debit” on the client side i.e. bill received electronically by you and paid automatically by your systems provided that the bill is “within spec” (obviously for that to be even vaguely secure a lot of things would have to happen) but you can shut that down instantaneously without having to deal with either the provider or the bank.
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FWIW US banking laws are different, but a very common form of automatic bill payment there is that the vendor sends an electronic bill to your financial institution, and the financial institution pays it on the due date or a number of days prior, for the full balance, minimum payment, or a fixed amount that one specifies in preferences.
Turning it off is thus Very Easy since it only requires deleting the account from one’s automatic payments.
The technology has been around for yonks, just not here, and maybe or maybe not within our banking systems.
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Perhaps you should try contacting The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman
https://www.tio.com.au/contact-us ?
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