Octopus Payment Scam

By Paul Homewood

If you are with Octopus, don’t fall for their payments scam:

They send me emails like this every few months:

Hello Paul,
We continually review your account balance and monthly payments to help keep your account on track, and it looks like your current payments might not be enough to keep your account healthy, so we’re suggesting an increase to your monthly payments.
We’re increasing your payments to £243.59 a month, starting from 12 August.

The increase is based on a combination of:

• Your current energy usage
• Your current balance
• The future costs of your energy

Our Balance Forecast tool can help you see how your monthly payments affect your account balance over time — if you’re thinking of changing your monthly payments you should take a look first. If you’d like to set your payments to a different amount, you can do that on your account.
If you’re happy with our recommendations, you don’t need to do anything. We’ll adjust your payments automatically, starting from 12 August.

Currently my account is in credit, and by the end of summer will be about £200 in credit. I am also on a 12-month fixed contract which expires in September.

Naturally over the winter months, usage will go up and put my account into the red, but over the year as a whole it averages out – my payment of £220 a month is actually slightly higher than my usage.

What Octopus want is for my account to be permanently in credit, in order to provide them with interest free finance.

It is actually very easy to go into your account and change the payment back again, but most people don’t realise this or will bother.