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| Paul1965 wrote: F***ing DART charge rip-off. Pure greed. Ramping the charge from £2.50 to a £70 fine if you don't pay by the end of the next day is just profiteering. | |
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Yup.
One of my colleagues had an even better one.
So, he's got his own DART account as he travels between Ipswich and somewhere in Kent on a regular basis.
Now, he was going on a training course from work and had a company pool car to get there. The course was in Kent somewhere so he had to use DART. He just went and forgot to pay the charge because he was used to it just being deducted automatically from his account when he went in own car. His bad, to which he admits.
Now, because he'd been in a pool car that the company rents from a third party the charge notice went to the hire company first. They passed it onto our finance department within 2 days I think. Finance then sat on it for nearly a month by which time the charges has doubled (there's a delayed payment penalty on it).
When Finance finally contacted him the charge had gone from the original ~£140 to somewhere in the region of £400 because of the late payments and the admin fee charged by the rental company. Funnily enough he went absolutely ape at them and refused to pay all but the original fine (they eventually agreed to this).
In a similar vein, my parents have been studiously ignoring a parking fine issued by a private car park in Scotland using ANPR.
So my mum goes into this car park but there aren't any spaces. It's quite a big car park so by the time she leaves she's been in there for over 10 minutes which the car park considers to mean that you've parked.
A while later a parking charge thing is delivered to the parents. I know the law in Scotland is a bit different from elsewhere in the UK and Dad decides they'll just ignore it and see what happens, confident that, as Mum had a witness in the car, they'd be able to successfully contest it court if it ever went that far.
So, queue a series of increasingly threatening letters, not of which they respond to. It eventually looks like the parking people have dropped it.
However, last month my brother gets a letter from a parking company claiming he's liable for this parking charge. Now, my brother and Dad have the same first initial and surname but apart from that my brother has no connection to the vehicle - he's not (and never has been) the registered keeper and he wasn't on the insurance at the time the parking fine was issued so how the hell did they manage to get his address to send him a payment demand?
I think they should go full GDPR because it seems like a massive overreach to try and drag my brother into this. I'm assuming the parking company managed to get his details of DVLA in which case they've made a serious mistake.
