I received another letter from TalkTalk credit control reminding me that my account is overdue. It also states “This letter is notification of our intention place a restriction on your service until above balance is paid”.

Grammar police out there, is the above sentence grammatically correct? Doesn’t sound right to me!

So anyway, I go through the process again and call them up. I don’t owe them money, they owe me and I don’t use their service so any threat of cutting me off is nonsense.

The guy on the other end of the phone tells me there are notes on my account and credits need to be raised but for this to happen I have to speak to their customer service where I politely tell him I have tried in the past to no avail and I don’t see why I should wait in a queue for more than an hour to speak to someone and suggest he does it instead.

He tells me he can’t talk to customer services. I tell him I’m not prepared to waste my time holding on for them and at least he gets paid for his time so he can do it. He tells me again he can’t talk to customer services.

So I guess we are at stale mate. I don’t see why I should have to waste my time trying to sort out problems that are of their own doing.

When I get time I might take TalkTalk to the small claims court for the money they owe me but it just seems a lot of hassle for the sum involved.

I’m normally quite a calm person but I am being driven to despair by TalkTalk and their crap customer service and inability to do even simple things like stop hasling me for money I don’t owe them.

I received a letter today telling me they were going to place a restriction on my service until I pay an outstanding balance. Well good luck as I don’t have your broadband and haven’t had it since the 5th September.

On calling them they agree that according to the notes on my account I am due a credit but this hasn’t been raised. Their Credit Control department tell me they can’t do anything so I have to speak to customer services. After waiting on the line for 20 minutes listening to the same old tune over and over again and feeling my blood pressure rise by the minute I gave up.

I’ve given up with TalkTalk. I’m not even going to try and call them agian. Sue me if you like, you won’t be getting a penny out of me!

Despite the fact that I haven’t had TalkTalk broadband since the 5th September 2006 they still insist on billing me and chasing me for money.

When I first received a bill for October they told me it was because I had to give 30 days notice to cancel and that I had to pay. When I told them I gave them notice on the 25th July 2006 I was told the invoice would be credited and would show on my next bill.

Now I didn’t trust TalkTalk as their promises seldom come to fruition so I decided to cancel my direct debit to make sure they didn’t get the money which wasn’t due to them. A couple of days later I received a letter telling me I had cancelled my direct debit and I should use an alternative method of payment.

Then today I received a letter telling me my account was overdue. When I rang their credit control department and explained I don’t have broadband with them they told me I still had to pay.

To cut a long story short I think I eventually got my point through and was told my account was going through the termination process and all will be resolved on Friday.

I have no faith in Talk Talk being able to sort this out but fingers crossed miracles might happen and I’ll be finally rid of them. We’ll see soon I guess.

My brother was recently a victim of internet fraud where someone had got his log in details for online banking and setup transfers to send money to another account. Now this really surprised me as he is not stupid and runs his business on the internet and wouldn’t have fallen prey to any phishing emails.

He runs anti virus software on his PC but received a key logging program via an email which wasn’t picked up by him or by the software. These key loggers record all the key strokes you make on your PC and then sends the results through to the criminals who then analyze this data trying to strip out usernames and passwords to get access to any online accounts you may have.

Given that the security of most online banks has improved over the years I questioned how they managed to get through. When he logs onto internet banking he has to enter his log in details and then is taken to a separate page which he then has to go through further security and enter random characters from another password via a drop down menu. These menus are very secure and stop key loggers from getting these details hence making your sign in more secure.

So how did they get in? My brothers downfall was due to laziness which I’m sure there are many hundreds of thousands of people who would fit into this category. What he had done was use 1 password across many other accounts he had with people like Ebay, Paypal, Web Hosting accounts etc, because it was easier for him to remember and it was this password which he also used for his online banking drop down menu password.

Now the criminals will be able to see this pattern and used it to get into his bank account. Luckily he caught it quite quickly and the bank were able to instantly return the money but has he have not logged in for some days he might not have been so lucky.

The moral to the story is “Don’t use the same password across multiple accounts“.

Carphone Warehouse are buying AOL Uk for £370 million pounds and together with it’s TalkTalk broadband operation will make it the third largest broadband in the UK.

Given the problems that Carphone Warehouse have with Talk Talk broadband is this such a good idea?