Virgin chased my late mother for £219 after I’d told them she’d died

VIRGIN Media owes £109.75 to my late mother’s estate. After she died last October, I called to close her account. However, a default notice for £218.68 arrived at her house in January 2018.

When I investigated, it turned out that she had two accounts, one for her phone and broadband — which had been closed — and another for two television boxes.

Virgin asked me to settle both by credit card over the phone, which I did. When the TiVo boxes were collected at the end of January, we learned that the account had been put into my name and I was told to ring Virgin to disconnect it. I did, only to discover it was still in my mother’s name!

Eventually, we received a bill on January 30 showing a credit of £109.75. We have still not received this money. C. R., Leeds. You called Virgin Media on November 6 to tell them your mother had died.

These calls can be horribly difficult, as each time you phone an organisation you are once again confronting the unthinkable event that has occurred.

Virgin responded on January 4 by sending a letter addressed to your mother threatening court action and debt collectors for an unpaid bill. Charming!

How were you to know your mother had two accounts? Surely once you called with the name and address, Virgin should have matched the accounts.

Virgin has now apologised for the ‘poor way we dealt with Ms R’s requests to close her late mother’s accounts’ adding that ‘this should not have happened and we’ve apologised for the distressed caused’.

It has issued a cheque for the credit to you and added £100 as a goodwill gesture.

I also questioned Virgin’s request that you settle the account using your own credit card. It says that when a customer passes away, the executors of the estate are asked to bring the account up-to- date and settle any outstanding balance.

But the fact is that it is the estate that owes the money, not the executor. If there is no money in the estate, the debt must be written off. What’s more, as an unsecured creditor, Virgin falls some way down the list of those who should be paid from any money in the estate.

Better practice would be for it to issue a final bill, which the executor can then settle once higher priority debts have been cleared and assets gathered together. under no circumstances should a relative or executor be asked to pay the bill out of their own funds. I HAVE five premium bonds from 1959/60 and am trying to establish to whom they belong.

I have contacted National Savings & Investments (NS&I) in Glasgow and it won’t confirm this for me.

If I have the bonds and they belong to someone else, surely NS&I should be helping me to return them to the owner.

I cannot win anything with these bonds, neither can the person who owns them if I have the certificates. And what of these bonds over the past 58 years? Could they have won a prize? Or maybe they have not been in the draw at all?

I was born in 1947 and thought they may have been bought for my birthdays either by my parents or my aunt. They have all now passed away. R. A., Dewsbury, W. Yorks. I TaCkled this issue in my Prudent Investor column a few months ago, and came away with the clear impression that NS&I either doesn’t understand the problem, or cannot be bothered to resolve it.

Its refusal to say who is the owner of a bond not only causes frustration for those who hold the unidentified bonds, but may also be depriving legitimate winners of their money.

NS&I has written to you asking that you send any names in which you think the bonds may be registered, then it will confirm whether or not this is the case. You can play this guessing game

ad infinitum, but NS&I will not reveal the names of owners unless they can be matched to those you suggest.

Meanwhile, the costs to you and the wasted time mount up.

of course there are data protection restrictions, but surely there is a better way to handle this.

Perhaps NS&I could let those who discover the bonds sign away all right to them if NS& I undertakes to attempt to track down the owners. after a sensible period, the bonds could be cancelled and no longer entered into draws.

To answer your other questions, there is no time limit for claiming prizes, so cancelling old bonds would not affect prizes already won.

Bonds remain in the draw for only 12 months after someone dies, during which time any prize is sent to the executor of the will. Beyond this they are no longer eligible to win prizes.

But if NS&I has not been told that the bondholder is deceased, prizes can still be allocated to the bond — it is only when NS&I is aware the bondholder has died that bonds are declared invalid and prizes are given instead to the next eligible bond in the draw.

and this is the crux of the issue. People who should have won a prize may not have had it awarded to them because it is still allocated to someone who is long dead.

and for that we can blame NS&I’s intransigent policy to those who find old bonds but have no idea to whom they belong.