Npower grovels over new customer data cock-up

npower_adNpower has been forced to apologise for a database gaffe which led to a woman receiving a court summons demanding over £1,000 for unpaid electricity bills even though she was not even a customer of the energy giant.
Rebecca Riley received a barrage of letters from the company, demanding that she pay the bill, but despite contacting the company by post, telephone and email, the letters continued to pile up.
When contacted by Telegraph Money, Npower finally admitted that there had been a mistake, conceding that the letters should have been sent to someone completely different at a similar-sounding street address two miles away.
It blamed the issue on the national industry database.
An Npower spokesman said: “We were so sorry to hear about the confusion. We were using information from the national industry database, which was unfortunately incorrect. This has now been amended and we are apologising to Rebecca for the confusion and sending her flowers.”
Database confusion has previously affected customers when they attempted to switch tariffs. In 2014 almost 40,000 households were incorrectly transferred between energy companies because of mistakes in the database.
Late last year, energy regulator Ofgem warned Npower it will be banned from advertising and sales if it fails to meet new targets following the imposition of a record £26m fine for a billing fiasco.
The issue, which affected more than 500,000 customers between September 2013 and December 2014, led to some customers having hundreds of pounds withdrawn from their bank accounts each day.

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