Thought I would share this with you all as we are on holiday, having a great time relaxing in this fabulous weather (pouring down, thunder, 17 degrees) in the South of France. We arrived at our apartment in the Langeudoc on Friday this week. On Friday we received an email from EDF stating they were unable to take their due money for our electricity bill for our apartment in St Cyprien, because of a techical difficult with our bank account. The difficulty is that our account co ordinates were changed by our bank two months ago. When this happened we contacted the relevant organisations and gave them the new co ordinates the same day.
On Saturday (yesterday) we received a second email stating we would be cut off if we did not pay our account off immediately. They gave a link for us to click on and pay by debit card, naturally this didnt work...and the message you got when you clicked was page unobtainable. Then we had a phishing warning flash up saying the site wasnt safe. All the information we have on our account with EDF is at home in the Dordogne...a 5 hour drive away. We have family coming this week to stay with us at the apartment...and now have this problem to sort out.
My frustrations surround the facts that A. EDF were advised of our account details as changed by our bank weeks ago (by registered letter...and no we dont have the reciept here with us) B. we cant even seem to contact them via email anyway. C. what kind of organisation emails you one day asking you to sort out a problem then the next day threatens to cut you off...and D. either the emails are a scam or EDF really need to learn how to use websites correctly and provide links that work.....
GRRRRRHHHHHHH........sometimes I could do an organisation or five a lot of damage!!!!!
Thanks for that Don. The MacBook is fine....best thing about Macs is they dont tend to suffer the malware problems. I dont do any finances on my mac....have no banking, credit card info at all on line. Worse anything could do is take my passwords for sites like SFN...so if I start posting crazy posts.. then there is a 50% chance its not me!!!!
Since you went to the phishing link and tried to open some pages, I strongly urge running a malware remover such as Malwarebytes and/or Spybot Search and Destroy. I have used them both for years and run them each at least once a week. They never fail to find evil critters, even if they are just adware. It all slows the computer and causes glitches in a best case scenario. Worst case; it grabs your passwords for banks, etc.
Thanks....we will ring it tomorrow....
French. I got it off my EDF statement.
Brilliant...thank you as always...
You should find all the useful numbers you need here, Carol, including English speaking lines,although you probably don't need those. http://www.survivefrance.com/page/useful-links
ah...ok....phew...thought we had missed something....like another energy provider!!! silly me... of course its a monopoly....God forbid there should be any competition! Actually....in real terms we decided to go for the top dollar with EDF...I had no wish to find myself cut off, ever...and we have a standing order which always has meant they take what we owe...and at the end of the year we get a payback....its not that bad....and as we avoid December through February in France...tend to avoid the worst of the bills.
Sorry, Carol, I should have said. Our friend (who is also our landlord) pays the EDF by direct debit and sends us the bills. We wanted to keep the current arrangement (HC for 3 hours in the afternoon and 5 hours during the night) and if we put the bill in our name, we were told that EDF would not give us that package - apparently, so we were told, that particular package is of much greater benefit to the consumer than EDF, so no wonder they are trying to get rid of it. You'd laugh if you passed by our house on any given afternoon - kettle on, dishes being washed, vacuum cleaner, ironing, washing machine on the go. :-)
David is the above number a UK or French number please?
As a matter of interest Sheila...can I ask who you have your account with?
Thank you Roger.....OH is breathing again now....;-)
Very persistant Phisher this one, I've had six so far and still no power outage......................
Thank you for this David....I thought it was....and was determined we were not paying anything by card online... we found an EDF office in Perpignan and were going to go off there tomorrow...but have now found the link posted by Jo Blick with the English speaking helpline for EDF (thanks Jo)...now we have looked online...have discovered loads of warnings by EDF not to be taken in by emails which are phishing scams!!! thankyou to Shiela, managed to miss all these threads first time around...one very relieved husband....thanks guys!
David is right, Carol,and I get them all the time - I don't even have an account with EDF! This has been well covered before here on SFN - here's one of the discussions: http://www.survivefrance.com/forum/topics/edf-problem-any-remedies
Carol this is a phishing exercise. Ring 09 69 39 33 07 for EDF tomorrow. If they have your address they can work out what the real position is. In my experience EDF do not cut you off or warn of the same by email.