Sky insurance
Recently X-Ray has received a number of complaints from viewers who've bought insurance to cover their Sky TV service.
Angela Callan from Pembroke e-mailed to say that she took out insurance on her Sky box back in 2006. The cost was £6.99 a month.
But in January this year, she noticed that the insurance company had taken an extra payment of £49.99 from her bank account with no explanation, and the same thing happened again three months later.
James McLeod from Llangollen had a pretty similar experience. In February last year he got a call - which he thought was from Sky - offering him insurance.
He agreed, but he's since discovered that the company selling the insurance isn't linked to Sky. Just like Angela, James had unauthorised payments taken from his bank account.
When we started looking into this, we found that lots of you were experiencing problems with companies who claim to be affiliated to Sky. X-Ray reporter Rachel Treadaway-Williams met Jamie Roberts from Consumer Direct to find out more.
Jamie said, "They're basically offering a warranty service or an insurance service or some sort of repair service for either your Sky dish or your digital box or the whole connection package, some kind of repair warranty cover basically.
"We mainly see people who are mis-sold a contract whereby a trader's contacted them to advise them that their current policy is about to expire. They sign them for a new policy and then the consumer finds out a month or so down the line that they actually still have their original policy."
Consumer Direct is also aware of cases where sums of money are taken from customers' bank accounts. Jamie says "We have heard about this happening from time to time. You need to monitor your balances and if you do see suddenly they've taken more than the agreed amount, the quicker you see that and the quicker you look to try and get that resolved, the easier it is to look to try and get a resolution."
Jamie's advice is, "If you notice someone's taken money that hasn't been agreed or even if you notice that a direct debit has been setup against your account with a company that you may have spoken to on the phone but never officially entered a contract with or you don't feel you agreed to a contract, if you find yourself in that situation definitely speak to your bank straightaway but then come to us at Consumer Direct and we can talk you through and see where you stand legally."
Sky told us they are aware of these companies. They advise that if you get a call, and you want to check if it genuinely is from a Sky representative, you should ask them to give you your personal Sky account number and you should also ask the caller to tell you the date your subscription started. If they don't have that information then the caller isn't from Sky.
