Episode 18 Rip Off Britain

We asked you to tell us what's left you feeling ripped off,

and you contacted us in your thousands.

You've told us about the companies you think get it wrong and

the customer service that simply is not up to scratch.

They should be looking after their customers and they don't.

Loyalty to the customers is a very low priority.

You've asked us to track down the scammers who stole your money

and investigate the extra charges you say are unfair.

Big companies, big corporations, are more into the money

and the numbers than they are about the people.

And when you've lost out but no-one else is to blame,

you've come to us to stop others falling into the same trap.

It genuinely feels like I'm getting ripped off.

So whether it's a blatant rip-off or a genuine mistake...

We're here to find out why you're out of pocket and what you

can do about it.

Your stories, your money - this is Rip-Off Britain.

Hello and welcome to Rip-Off Britain, the programme that's

here to help you get the most from every penny you spend.

We want to make sure you don't end up out of pocket because of

things like unexpected bills, excessive charges or, indeed,

someone else's mistake.

Now, we all know how important it is to look after our money but if,

for whatever reason, the rug is suddenly pulled out from underneath

you, it can really hit your bank balance where it hurts, badly.

And in some cases, the damage it does to your credit rating

can have a disastrous long-term effect on your finances.

Now, in several of the situations we're going to be hearing about,

those problems can be fixed but there are some unforeseen

events that can't be changed,

and that's certainly the case for a group of women that I had

the pleasure of meeting earlier this year in one of our pop-up shops.

Like millions of others,

they have found that their whole financial future

has been thrown into chaos and it seems that there's

absolutely nothing that they can do about it.

Also coming up, the mobile phone giant whose billing mistakes

have cost thousands of customers months of misery.

I was absolutely furious.

I thought, "There's no way that I'm paying the bill.

"They're taking the mick!"

And how millions of us may unwittingly be giving

companies a front door key to our bank accounts,

allowing them to dip in just whenever they like.

I think it's really unfair that he was able to keep my card details

to just be able to take £50 from my account.

It's just totally unfair.

Now, we hear a lot about companies that get things wrong.

After all, we wouldn't be here if they didn't.

But there are few mistakes more annoying and potentially

damaging than billing mistakes,

especially if they mean that you end up paying more than you

should or because you're accused of owing money when you don't.

But the billing mistakes that are made by one of the UK's

biggest names are in a league of their own and, potentially,

they have far-reaching consequences.

And to make matters worse, the system that's being blamed

for these mistakes was actually brought in to make things better.

On this series,

we often turn to digital guru David McClelland for advice.

It's not out of warranty. It's still in warranty.

-He's been helping us out for four years.

-That's a lot.

But even David's tech savvy wasn't enough to keep him out of

trouble when he recently changed his mobile phone deal.

Clearly, there's something that has gone very, very wrong

in this transaction.

For the past four years,

David has been one of 20 million Vodafone customers.

It's the country's third biggest mobile phone provider and,

since autumn 2015, by far the most complained about.

In the first three months of the year, industry regulator

Ofcom received 29 complaints for every 100,000 Vodafone customers.

That's almost four times as many as any other mobile phone company.

And David was one of those complainants.

He'd been a relatively happy Vodafone customer until

he upgraded his contract just a few months ago.

I saw a new deal that I wanted to sign up to that gave

me unlimited calls, unlimited texts and 20 gigabytes of data per month.

So I snapped it up and I got a Sim after two or three days for

this new deal.

Unfortunately, that Sim didn't work but his regular monthly costs

kicked in straightaway as if all was going swimmingly.

Of course, David complained but,

after hours spent in online chats with customer services and

trying out various replacement Sim cards that still didn't work, David

was getting fed up of being billed for a service he couldn't use.

It took about six weeks for me to be in a position whereby I could

start making phone calls and start using the data on this new contract.

However, that wasn't the end of my problems because I was now

being charged twice as much.

First of all, I'd been charged all of this time when I didn't

have the use of my phone and then, secondly,

I was being charged twice as much as the original price that I bought at.

The £20 a month David had signed up for had now doubled to £40

a month and he was just as frustrated at the cost to his

time in trying to get Vodafone to sort everything out.

If I were to add up all of the time I've spent,

either on the phone,

on hold or going round in circles between different customer

service reps or on the online chat, if I added all of that up,

I think I'd be in excess of 24 hours.

That's how long I've spent chasing up my query from the beginning

to the end.

And it's incredibly frustrating because you're having to

tell your story again and again.

But David was just one of many Vodafone customers

experiencing problems around the same time.

In autumn 2015, the company made some big changes to its

customer services and billing system and, somewhere along the line,

something went wrong.

Thousands of customers complained about being put on the wrong tariff,

direct debits being set up incorrectly

and other mistakes with their bills.

In autumn 2015, the number of complaints

from its customers escalated.

Vodafone says that it spent £2 billion consolidating

a number of different databases into a single state-of-the-art system.

It's kind of ironic, really, isn't it,

that Vodafone's invested a lot of money to create something to improve

customer experience but exactly the opposite's gone and happened?

Vodafone said, at the time,

that it had underestimated the disruption that the new system

would cause and that it was working hard to sort the problems out.

And whether it succeeded or it was sheer persistence on his part

that solved David's problem, after seven weeks of complaining,

Vodafone did correct his bills.

Finally, my situation got resolved and I don't know how I did it.

And I don't know whether there's a counter - the number of times

you phone up, the number of times you're on the online chat -

and I just went past the 20-hour mark or something and it

flagged it up to a manager and she took ownership of the issue in

a way that nobody else had done up until that point.

David has stuck with Vodafone for the time being but the whole

episode has left a bad taste in his mouth.

I can only speak about my own experiences

and they were very, very poor indeed and I would find it difficult,

based upon those experiences,

to recommend Vodafone to anyone else at the moment.

And in his day job as a tech expert, he's come across

dozens of fellow Vodafone customers who might feel the same.

There do appear to have been some systematic failures within

Vodafone's internal systems,

such that we don't know the true scale of the problem here.

A lot of people, more people than ever before,

have flown the flag and said, "We've got a problem.

"We're being charged too much.

"We're getting black marks against our credit record,"

all sorts of horrible things.

And certainly, since its new systems were introduced,

we've had more e-mails from Vodafone customers than about any

other mobile phone provider, with every single one of them about

a billing problem.

Among those to contact us was Christine Hanks from

Pontefract in Yorkshire.

Her Vodafone troubles started during a holiday in the West Country.

I had service fine on the Friday, I had internet, I was texting

people to say I'd arrived OK, and then I got up Saturday morning

and I couldn't phone out, but then I wasn't receiving any calls either.

But I thought, "Well, I'm away," so it wasn't really a problem.

Thinking she was simply in an area with poor reception,

Christine thought little more about it until she got home and her

phone wasn't working there either.

So she took it into a Vodafone shop and, after about a fortnight

of toing and froing, they got things working properly again.

Eventually got my service back.

It was all back online and I was back up and running,

the phone was fine.

They offered me a £40 credit for non-use of my phone.

But, as happened with David, once Christine's service problems

were sorted, her billing problems began.

I expected the next bill to be £40 less going out of my account

in the July. That didn't happen so I phoned them up.

They said, "We're really sorry about this,

"it will get knocked off your next bill."

But it was the same story in August, September and then in October.

Vodafone didn't put the promised credit on her bill and,

by then, Christine's patience had run out.

I decided to leave Vodafone. I'd had enough.

The customer service was absolutely dire. I wasn't getting anywhere.

You know, it had taken them two weeks to sort the server

problem out. Surely, a debit problem could have been sorted out in a day?

So Christine cancelled her contract but,

as you might have guessed, it wasn't going to be that easy.

When the final settlement bill came, I still hadn't got

the £40 credit that they'd promised me back in June.

Um...I was furious, really. I was absolutely furious.

I thought, "There's no way that I'm paying the bill.

"They're taking the mick!"

Vodafone were asking for nearly £300 to cancel the contract but Christine

refused to pay up until they gave her the promised £40 credit.

Then in December,

a representative of the company called up to make an offer.

£130 and that was it - that would close the account and everything.

I said, "Yes, that's great." So I offered to pay there and then.

He said, "No, wait while you get the paperwork."

He wanted it in black-and-white

and I thought, "Yes, that's a good idea, really,

"I'll wait until I get the final bill, £130."

And to this day, I've never received a final bill.

Six months and numerous e-mails, phone calls and letters later,

the situation remains unresolved and,

because the disputed bill hasn't been paid,

Christine is now being pursued by a debt collection agency.

It's just ridiculous that it's still not sorted out.

I'm now receiving debt letters and, obviously, they'll be going up.

Now, although David, Christine and the other viewers we've heard

from did all notice that Vodafone was billing them incorrectly,

some of the sums involved were relatively small

so they could quite easily have gone unnoticed by someone who

doesn't check their bill each month, which is why, in June 2016,

the website MoneySavingExpert.com advised all 20 million

Vodafone customers to check their bills in detail and look for

potential mistakes caused by what it called

systematic failures at Vodafone.

But when we contacted Vodafone, it said that,

since the start of 2016,

it's implemented numerous specific improvements to its systems,

boosting training, and made significant investments in

additional UK call centre resources.

As a result, the company says it's receiving around 20,000 fewer

customer calls per day and has seen a 90% drop in customers

asking for their bills to be recalculated.

And while it says the early benefits of its significant efforts

also include a fall in the number of complaints to both Ofcom and

the telecoms ombudsman, it's pledged to continue to work hard and

invest significantly to further improve its customers' experience.

Vodafone has apologised to any customer who's had an issue

with its customer service, including David, whose problems it

accepts should have been sorted sooner, and Christine.

It's now removed all the outstanding charges on her account and

offered her a goodwill payment of £150 in recognition

of the issues that she faced.

But while the company's confident that its problems are in the past,

David has this advice for any customer who thinks their own issue

has not been satisfactorily resolved.

If you don't get suitable feedback from them,

then lodge an official complaint on the Vodafone website.

And at that point, if all else fails,

then go to the Communications Services Ombudsman.

They are an independent body who will look at all of the facts

in the case.

Over the last few months,

they've found in roughly 60% of the cases that the customer had

a valid complaint and Vodafone was in the wrong.

Now, here's a topic we know really gets your goat because you

send us dozens of e-mails about it every month.

Here's how it goes - you sign up for a free trial of something,

say, gym membership or movie streaming services or

magazine subscriptions or whatever, then a few weeks later,

you discover you're now paying for that service and that's because,

whether you realise it or not,

you've agreed to an automatic renewal of whatever it was

you signed up to, meaning companies can charge you without having

to ask your permission every time.

Now, in theory,

that's really convenient but the banks get hundreds of

complaints about this every day because,

if you have unwittingly given a company permission to take

money from your account,

there's usually very little you can do to get it back.

Now, you wouldn't normally give anyone permission to dip into your

bank account whenever they decided they're entitled to, would you?

But millions of us do that every day by agreeing to make payments

with what's called a continuous payment authority.

Around half of us have done so but that doesn't mean we have

a clue how it works.

I haven't knowingly signed up for a continuous payment authority

and I really wouldn't know what it meant.

I've taken one out but I actually didn't know about them taking

money out, and I'm not very happy about that at all.

I would be concerned that perhaps companies could abuse that and get

people to sign up for things without them realising

what they're signing up for.

And that's a major concern for Trading Standards who

recently warned that one of the biggest threats to consumers today is the so-called subscription traps,

where you sign up for a free or special offer only to be trapped

into making monthly payments which then prove difficult to stop.

We've reported on the worst kind of continuous payment authority or CPA before.

But most of these recurring payments are used by respectable,

everyday businesses.

Netflix, Amazon Prime and magazine subscription services are

among those who use them.

So they don't have to fiddle about with standing orders

or direct debits and customers don't have to remember to pay.

But here at Rip Off Britain,

we still get a lot of e-mails about CPAs,

usually from people who weren't aware they'd even signed up for one.

And at this RBS NatWest call centre,

staff are on the receiving end of the same complaint.

Around us, the team here are taking calls from customers.

One average, 1,500 customers per day are contacting us around

a continuing payment authority.

What's really interesting is,

that we find that 85% of customers who have signed up to a free trial

are not aware that they've signed up to a continuing payment authority.

And typically, we're their first port of call when they contact us to say, "What's happened here?"

What that then means for us is we have to actively educate all of

those customers and we also need to let them know that they had given the authority.

But we then need to help them understand how to better protect themselves going forward.

But when companies do explain in plain terms how these payments work,

it can make regular transactions quick and simple.

We see reputable companies use continuous payment authorities

in a really responsible manner.

They'll notify the customer

a few days before they are about to take out another payment.

And that's fine if you agree with what's been charged.

But as Alice Ridgley from High Wycombe discovered,

there can be a very big downside when you've given a company access to your account.

Alice is a busy mum so anything that makes life easier is a bonus.

I've got two boys, they're five and six.

One of them needs a wheelchair for when we're going round the supermarket.

I think any mum finds shopping stressful with little ones.

In April 2015, Alice decided to ease the pressure by signing up

to a home delivery fruit and vegetable service, Kelly's Vegies.

She'd get a box of fresh produce delivered to her door every month.

And after a free trial, a continuous payment authority gave the

business permission to take £30 from her account each time.

There's a lot of choice out there

for fruit and veg boxes but this was local and to offer you

a free child box, to me, sounded like an absolute winner.

The quality of the fruit and vegetables, I never had any complaints about.

My children loved the fruit and vegetable box arriving.

They loved not knowing what was going to be in there and the surprise.

Though she hadn't realised the free trial would roll on to into

continuing subscription, Alice was at first happy to continue receiving the boxes.

But after seven months, she decided to cancel the service because

she always ended up with too much left over.

She assumed that would mean the end of her contract with Kelly's Vegies,

and to the company taking money out of her back account.

But a week after receiving her last crate of fruit and veg,

Alice got an e-mail from Kelly Wheeler,

the owner of the business informing her that due to an apparent

missed collection on one of the company's crates,

her account had been charged £20.

Now you might wonder how it is that money you haven't explicitly

authorised can simply be taken out of your account.

Well, continuous payments may at first seem rather like a direct debit

but, in fact, they are very different.

Most crucially because, more often than not,

what you've actually agreed to is for the company you're dealing with

to take money from your card whenever it decides that's appropriate.

I knew Kelly's Vegies

had my card details and I knew they'd be able to charge

me for the fruit and vegetables but I didn't think about the

implications of the company having my card details

to then impose any other charges...

..to my card as and when they wished.

When Alice contacted the company's owner, he quoted their terms

and conditions which made clear his right to levy extra charges

in situations such as failing to put out a box for collection.

But not having realised that before

and annoyed that her money had been taken without any warning,

Alice left a review of her experience online

so others would be in

no doubt as to the implications of the company's terms and conditions.

I don't believe my review was nasty in any way.

I was honest about the produce.

I said the produce was actually good.

I just thought that other people should be aware of the terms and conditions.

But that's when things got really messy.

Because to Alice's horror,

money was taken out of her account for that too.

Within 24 hours, I got an e-mail from Kelly to say that he had

taken £50 from my bank account for leaving a bad review online.

And that if I was to remove the review,

he would give me my £50 back.

He then went on to say every day that I left the bad review up

online, he would take another £50 from my card and would charge

me £50 every day while it was there.

On rechecking the terms and conditions online,

Alice saw a clause had been added stating that customers could

be charged for posting negative reviews.

And while you should be able to cancel

a continuous payment authority

by simply asking the company or your bank to stop it,

in this case, Alice felt the only way to be sure no more money

could be taken from her account was to cancel her bank card altogether.

But even doing that wasn't quite the end of Alice's troubles.

The owner of Kelly's Vegies took her to court to try and get the money,

although on the date of the hearing he didn't show up,

meaning Alice automatically won the case.

This isn't the first time the way Kelly's Vegies handles its

continuous payments has called caused controversy.

In 2015, the company fell foul of the Advertising Standards Authority

which found that, at the time,

the ads for its free trial box didn't make clear that

signing up could be the beginning of an ongoing subscription.

And for Mike Andrews from Trading Standards,

it's vital that such information is obvious right away.

The information around any ongoing commitment to pay and the

full cost of the service has got to be presented to the consumer

at the outset.

So simply burying it in a long set of terms and conditions

that the consumer may have ticked a box to say they've read those

terms and conditions isn't good enough from our point of view.

And that is clearly misleading and harmful to consumers.

When we contacted Kelly's Vegies about Alice's case,

it reiterated that the £20 charge made to her card for

the collection of the crate was made according to its terms and

conditions which Alice had signed up to.

As for the charge it made for the review she posted online,

the company maintains it was inaccurate and that malicious

reviews can cause financial damage to small businesses.

But it acknowledged that its new clause on this was created in

a panic and shouldn't have been added and nor should Alice

have ever been charged.

Kelly's Vegies said it understands the money is due to

be repaid via Alice's card provider under the chargeback scheme.

The company went on to say that following the ASA's ruling,

it's amended its leaflets and has added its terms and

conditions to the front page of its website.

And it said that its service is not a subscription trap as

accounts can be cancelled with immediate effect.

But confusion around recurring payments and, in particular,

how they can be stopped led in 2013 to the Financial Conduct Authority

stepping in to remind banks of their obligation to

cancel them if a customer requests it.

And though that has made things clearer,

according to Trading Standards, continuous payment authorities

still generate a quite staggering number of complaints.

The latest figures that we have are somewhere in the region

of about two million consumers a year have some form of

difficulty with a subscription service they have signed in to

that they then want to try and get themselves out of.

But there are plans to put more protection in place for consumers.

What we're trying to work towards is a situation where the

consumer can get some sort of recompense for the monies

that they have already paid out and lost because the law isn't

necessarily very clear on that particular point.

In the meantime, if you're at all unsure about whether a free trial you're tempted by

might lead to future charges, Mike has some very simple advice.

If you were signing up to any sort of online service or

free trial where it asks for the long card number off the front of

your bank or credit card,

that should immediately start raising suspicions

unless it's made quite clear from the outset that there is a future obligation to pay

but if there isn't, then we would urge consumers to look carefully at any terms and conditions or any

other information that might be present on the website

that demonstrates that there will be some sort of future payment.

James, can you see the duck over there?

Oh, yeah.

As for Alice, she'd never appreciated exactly what

a continuous payment authority can mean.

I think the fact that they've got your card details and can

charge you whenever they like for whatever they like,

I just think it's a terrible practice.

I don't think people should have your cards and be able to

amend their terms and conditions to suit the situation at the time

and then charge you.

It just doesn't seem right at all.

Still to come on Rip Off Britain, the change in pension rules

that's left these women and millions more in uproar.

All dreams for my retirement are shattered.

What are all those women going to do?

You know, what are we going to do if we're not getting our pensions?

The Trafford Centre, Manchester,

our venue for the latest Rip Off Britain pop-up shop.

And as ever, our experts were determined to tackle as many

of your consumer nightmares as they possibly could.

-That's great advice.

-Do you think it'll help?

-Yeah, I do.

As well as our busy shop, we had a busy gripe corner -

your spot to drop in and tell us what really gets on your nerves.

And the topic taking pole position...

-Car insurance.

-Car insurance.

-Car insurance.

-Car insurance for young drivers is so expensive.

Car insurance going up every year when I haven't even made a claim.

I think it's absolutely scandalous what they charge young people nowadays.

It's come up at double the price it was last year.

My insurance quote just keeps going up and will it ever stop?

We were sharing tips and advice right across the shopping centre.

And technology expert David McClelland was keen to test out

a new way that it's hoped we can keep our personal details safe

without having to remember all those pesky passwords.

Some banks, building societies,

other service providers are looking at new ways of securing us

using bits of our body, biometrics, if you like, our voice,

our thumbprints, our faces, selfie security -

these are all technologies that will be with us very shortly indeed.

To demonstrate how new ideas like this will work,

David has brought along a mobile phone with a prototype banking app

that uses the customer's voice instead of

a password or other personal details.

It's already up and running with one UK bank and in 2016,

it's being rolled out to an estimated 19 million HSBC and TalkTalk customers.

So, before you know it,

this could well be the way that you'll be logging into your bank.

So the first thing you need to do is to register your voice.

What you're going to have to do is to say, "My voice is my password," three times.

And from you saying it those three times,

it will have all the information it needs to uniquely identify you.

OK. My voice is my password.

My voice is my password.

And then a final time.

My voice is my password.

There we go. It says your pass phrase is now active.

And to check if it really works, David tries to log into the

new account with his voice using the same words.

-OK, I'll do my best Northern Irish accent.

-OK.

-NORTHERN IRISH ACCENT:

-My voice is my password.

Oh, no. I can't log in.

So do you think that people like Rory Bremner, do you think he,

because he's very good at mimicking, do you think he could break that?

No. They've tested this with identical twins

who you would think have the same sort of vocal characteristics.

They don't. They have different voices, different learned

behaviours, different physical behaviours.

So this stuff is so secure, it can even tell identical twins apart.

Oh, it's pretty clever, then.

But to see what shoppers would think, we tested it out on

one who, like many of us, struggles to remember her passwords.

How secure do you feel with your passwords and with your online presences?

It does make me a bit nervous and if you know me well enough,

you know where I keep my passwords so you would be able to find them.

So I suppose things like finger and voice recognition, I mean, I don't know much about them but...

-Do you want to have a go?

-My voice is my password.

Your pass phrase is active.

-So then all I have to say is the same phrase again?

-Yeah, you've got it.

My voice is my password.

-Welcome back.

-Wow.

-It's pretty secure.

-Do you like it?

-Absolutely.

I mean, I signed up for cinema,

things like that which I don't use regularly and every time I

have to re-email for them to resend me passwords every time whereas

that would be amazing.

Back in the main part of our pop-up shop,

personal finance journalist Sarah Pennells was meeting

a number of women who all share the same problem.

And it's one we know from our inbox is worrying many of you.

Wendy and her friends are part of an estimated 2.6 million women

who only got a few years' notice

that their pension age is going to rise,

leaving them with a six-year gap between when they thought they were

going to retire at 60 and the new age of 66 which is when they will

now be eligible for their money.

I did not have time to financially prepare for my retirement.

So that has left me now in financial hardship along with thousands

of other women throughout the country.

Lynn worked in local government,

Barbara was a teacher,

Sue's job was in further education,

and Wendy worked for social services.

I've been in work all my life.

All that time I thought I could retire at 60,

only to get to 58 years old

and find out the goalposts had been moved.

So all my dreams for my retirement are shattered.

Between them, these women have paid 170 years of national insurance.

But now with their main careers at an end,

they say they're struggling to get a job that plugs the gap before

they can draw the state pension at 66.

So now I'm looking for a job and I can get interviews

cos I got a lot of qualifications and experience but I can't

actually land the job.

And I'm going to be running out of Jobseeker's Allowance in a bit

and because I've got a bit of savings but not much,

I'm not going to be able to get any benefits.

Sarah, you've listened to what the ladies have said and clearly you are not alone.

There is an entire generation out there of women who find themselves in exactly the same position.

What can they do, if anything?

The state pension age rise is by far and away the biggest issue

that I get e-mails and comments and contact about.

The real difficulty is there isn't an easy resolution of saying,

"Do this and you'll get your state pension."

We're hoping that the government will relook at it because they have done a very rapid age hike.

Very rapid because anyone born before 1st April 1953

is getting a pension.

Anyone born after 1st April 1953 is having to wait three or four years more.

The women are part of a campaign group

lobbying Government on the issue.

And Sarah thinks that this sort of pressure

may make politicians look at this again.

I am more hopeful about this than I have been for some time

because we've had, I think, five debates in Parliament about

the rises in state pension age.

And, I think, it would be hard for the government to now do nothing

which is what they've done up until now

because there is so much pressure on this issue.

Across our two days at the Trafford Centre,

it's a story we've heard again and again.

I can't tell you, Angela, how angry I am about this.

What are all those women going to do?

You know, what are we going to do if we're not getting our pensions?

But when we spoke to the Department for Work and Pensions about this,

it told us that the plan to equalise men and women's state pension age was announced over 20 years ago.

And that, even though the speed of doing that was changed in 2011,

in response to a sharp rise in life expectancy,

women today can still expect to receive a higher state pension

over their lifetime than any women before them.

And it added that there are no plans to make any further concessions.

But despite that, it seems clear that this is

a generation of women determined to keep fighting.

The government is saying that they've had an enquiry and,

the thing is, they haven't got a magic pot of money.

Well, do you know? Neither have we.

Now, if I was to say to you, "What's your number?"

You might just think that I was talking about your phone number,

your national insurance number or some other piece of

information that I'll bet you can very easily put your hands on.

But, you know, there's another number just as important to all our lives

that we don't always give the attention it needs or, indeed,

even know how to get it and that's our credit score.

It's a number that can make all the difference to not just simple

finance agreements but the most crucial life-changing ones as well.

And, yet, many of us still don't really understand how credit ratings work

or just how easily our scores can be affected by even the slightest mistake.

Now, we hear a lot from people who have had problems with this.

But as we discovered when Angela and personal finance expert Sarah Pennells

did a bit of digging at our pop-up shop, we very often don't bother

checking our credit rating until something has already gone wrong.

Can I stop you for two minutes? Do you mind?

-Do you know what a credit rating is?

-Credit rating.

More than a half of us have never checked our credit file,

yet it is the key to unlocking finance from lenders.

Do you know what your credit rating is? Have you ever seen it?

-I've never actually looked into it, no.

-Never check it.

-Why not?

-Well, not for fear of what I might find. But I just think I'm good bet to be fair.

There are actually a couple of reasons why it is

a good idea to check your credit report.

First is identity fraud and identity theft.

It's a good way of finding out if somebody else has taken your details.

Also, sometimes, you know, you might have a store card or a credit card that you don't use any more.

And if you check your credit report, it's a really good reminder of actually what credit you've got.

You had to cut a store account recently and I said,

"Right, close it down," because it's just as, like, open lending that's still there.

And these days, what lenders take into account,

it's not just how much you borrow today, but how much you could borrow.

Yeah, that's it, yeah.

So if you've got cards you don't use, but you could in theory go and spend £1,000.

That might mean they think, "Well, we won't lend you this money

"because they could go on a spending spree tomorrow."

That's just one of dozens of factors that influence your credit score.

And therefore control whether you're able

to take out any kind of credit agreement,

from loans and mortgages, right down to a new telephone contract.

But if you're not the person responsible for whatever it

was that brought your total down, it can feel really unfair.

Will Maddox from Canterbury has discovered just that.

He was rejected for a new mobile phone contract because of an issue with his credit rating.

Until that point, Will had no idea that he even had a credit score,

let alone that applying for something

as simple as a £12.99 a month phone could lead to problems.

I went to the phone shop, they took a load of details which they put into a computer.

The young man was very helpful.

But having put all the details in, I could see that he was frowning.

He then said, "I've obviously done something wrong. I'll try again."

And this is what he did.

He put the details in again and then he said, "I'm sorry, it's been rejected

"because of your low credit score."

Neither of them knew it but it was the assistant's initial

mistake that ended up causing the problem because doing

a credit check twice and so quickly in succession had an incident

and negative impact on the Will's credit rating.

At the time, though, all the assistant could do was

flag up that there had been some kind of credit rating issue

leaving Will rather baffled as to what was going on.

His bank was able to reassure him that, in fact, he wasn't on

a credit blacklist and that his rating was solid.

And it was only when staff there suggested

he speak to one of the credit rating agencies that Will was able

to start piecing together exactly what had happened and discover how

the phone shop's checks did have an impact.

It appears that when I got the credit rating,

I found that it had gone down by 14 points due, they said, to

two recent apparent acquisitions on credit on that date

which were at the phone shop.

Now, although Will's credit rating is still considered

excellent, the incident has made him concerned that

a similar error might affect it again.

I've been assured by the credit companies that I haven't a problem.

But having done that, it still... there's still this niggle, "Have they missed something?"

I do need to know, is the problem mine or theirs?

So Will is going to Equifax along with Experian and Noddle,

one of the UK's three main credit rating agencies, to better

understand how the system works.

These agencies hold records about every single piece of credit

we've taken out in the past,

and, crucially, how good we are at paying it back.

Lenders then use that information to judge whether we are

a good bet for credit in the future.

I'm meeting him there to find out what we all need to do to

make sure that we are on top of our own scores.

Lisa Hardstaff is showing us how it all works.

-So what are the ratings? What do you actually say?

-We have five ratings.

I think it's actually the bands people should look at rather than

numbers cos each credit reference agency

has a different score because we have a different algorithm.

But we have five - very poor, poor, fair, good and excellent.

And it's those bands that you need to sort of try and work your way

up through or maintain them if you're in that level.

Regularly missing bill payments and defaulting on loans

will reduce your score and could put you in a different band altogether.

But as Will now knows, your score may even be affected simply by

a company running a check.

So each time, then, when somebody applies for

a credit, is that making your score go down?

What actually happens is, when you make an application for credit, that's recorded on your file.

If you make multiple applications in a short period of time,

then the lenders will see that you've been doing this and they

could consider it as either you need credit desperately or

you're unable to cope with the current credit that you have now.

And that could be a factor in their making

a decision about whether to give you more credit as well.

It's perhaps to be expected that being seen to apply for too much

credit can have an impact on your rating.

But it turns out, rather to Will's and I must say, my own surprise,

that not applying for enough can do exactly the same thing.

I think one of the things that we often find is, as people get older

and they've cleared off mortgages,

they think they are a good credit risk and, in fact, when you

apply for credit, the lenders look at the previous, say, six years' history.

And if you don't have any credit, then you are at risk of being rejected.

What do you mean by that, if you don't have any credit?

Cos if you've paid all your bills and you think you're in a good position,

just explain that a bit further.

What that means is, they're looking for a pattern of paying off credit

over a period of time and good behaviour so you pay it off on time and everything else.

As you say, it seems to me that if you pay everything on time

then you're being penalised, aren't you?

What you've got to remember is that the lenders are looking for

a pattern, a history of how you manage credit and, therefore, this

is where they might then decide to decline you because there is

no history showing that when you've had credit in the recent past

that you have paid on time and cleared it off on time.

But now that Will is aware of how even a simple mistake by somebody

else can reduce your score and, therefore, your creditworthiness,

he wants to know how to keep his rating as healthy as possible.

Missing a payment is the single most damaging thing that could affect it.

But if such a key detail is on your record by mistake,

it could have a devastating effect in the future.

In the year up to April 2016,

the Financial Ombudsman Service saw an extraordinary 86% increase

in complaints about credit report errors that weren't the consumer's fault.

But that still had an impact on the amount that they were allowed to borrow.

Fortunately, though, it is possible to remove incorrect details

that are stored on your file.

So how difficult is it to correct your score?

If it is wrong information, then you can put

a challenge in and you go to the credit reference agency of

your choice, you go in, you raise a complaint against it and they

will liaise with the company to make sure that the information is correct.

It's really not difficult to check whether your own credit records are correct.

You can find out exactly how to do it on our website -

the address of which is coming up in just a moment.

But with some of the advice he's taken from today's meeting,

Will has since seen his credit score actually increase and from now on,

he's determined to keep it in check.

If you've got a story you'd like us to investigate,

there are plenty of ways you can get in touch.

You can join the conversation on our Facebook page -

BBC Rip Off Britain.

Alternatively, log on to our website

bbc.co.uk/ripoffbritain

or if you'd like to send us an e-mail, our address is...

..and of course you can send a letter to our postal address.

Well, we know that the way we borrow money

has changed dramatically in recent years and for many of us,

credit is now absolutely central to our daily lives.

So it's really rather surprising that more of us don't pay

closer attention to those credit ratings. As we've just seen,

they rarely can make all the difference.

And, at this point, it's slap wrist time because I have to

confess upfront, until I made that film, I hadn't truly

appreciated just how important it is to stay on top of all of that.

As we've seen, mistakes with your credit records can and do

happen and they can very quickly snowball into

a problem that takes an awful lot of hassle to put right.

So it really is worth checking that the records held on you

are at least correct.

Well, there's a reminder of exactly how to do that on our website.

The address of which you know by now. It's...

And while you're there, why not keep sending us stories and topics that

you'd like us to investigate because we've got plenty more programmes

coming up over the next few months.

But where this particular programme is concerned, I'm afraid we

have run out time for the day so as ever, thanks so much for joining us.

-And until the next time from all of us...

-ALL: Bye-bye.