Number plate firm took eight months to shell out my £150
A.M. writes: I have had the misfortune to deal with Click4Reg Ltd. I put my car number plate up for sale with them, and last May they advised me it had been sold for £150. Since then, they have failed to pay me. They blamed the DVLA until I discovered the plate had been transferred on to a car months ago. Then they said they had problems with their phones. Finally, they said their payment system had failed.
ON May 10 last year, Click4Reg wrote from its offices in St Leonards-on-Sea, in East Sussex, congratulating you on the sale of your licence plate. There was a transfer form for you to complete, and the assurance that, ‘Shortly upon successful transfer of ownership, a member of our team will contact you to confirm that your payment cheque has been sent.’
You sent back the completed form, and weeks later in July, Click4Reg told you the transfer was ‘still going through with the DVLA’. It added that as soon as the transfer was confirmed, it would ‘release’ your £150 – suggesting that Click4Reg had already been paid by the buyer.
In November, you reminded the company that you were still waiting for your payment. It replied that ‘our telephone line is down due to maintenance’. Shortly after that, Click4Reg wrote that ‘our whole payments system is down’. It added: ‘Please rest assured we have our whole team working around the clock to get this sorted as soon as possible.’
And days before Christmas, an email told you that ‘we are currently waiting for a further response from our providers’.
But here’s a funny thing. An online review from another customer who was expecting a payment from Click4Reg says: ‘Latest excuse is that their system is down!’ And that was last May, so does this mean the company has suffered the same failure for six months?
And here is another online review: ‘Just got a call (November 22) to tell me systems down since this morning’. This morning? So did the round-the-clock team get things going again, only for them to collapse once more? So what is the problem with Click4Reg?
Well, one problem is that its most recent accounts say that it is owed more than £1million. Who owes all this cash? Unnamed ‘associates’ of Click4Reg, that’s who. In a nutshell, Click4Reg has lent loads of cash to people or companies – all connected to it – while failing to pay its own customers.
A bit more digging showed that Click4Reg is run by Elie Fakhoury. He also ran a separate company called The Sussex Exchange Limited, until it went bust last July, owing £1.85million. And among that huge debt, there is £830,462 owed to Click4Reg. And this is not his only troubled business. He also runs another Sussex company, Fakhoury Group Limited, which has an unsatisfied court judgment against it for £714. I put all this to Mr Fakhoury and invited his comments. He did not reply, but one of his staff told me: ‘Unfortunately, during the upgrade of our server security measures, we experienced some loss and errors in classification data. As a result, we are required to manually match each order with its corresponding transaction ID and payments. This process has inevitably caused delays.’
Your own wait is over though. After the string of excuses going back eight months, Click4Reg told me payment was on its way, and a few days ago you confirmed you had received your £150.
Nobody could accuse Click4Reg of hogging the fast lane, but going at the speed of a tranquillised tortoise deserves more than an apology, so it has added £50 on top.