BES Utilities
Part 1 – The Scam
“Hello, this is the commercial meter registration department, I’m calling today to register your commercial meter onto the network…”
Those words are forever etched into my brain, as this was the start of what would become a decade long saga, starting with a series of blog posts and escalating into a nearly 2 year long court battle in the High Court costing millions and millions of pounds, and then ending with the conviction of a multi-millionaire football club owning individual from Fleetwood, UK.
Sit back, grab a coffee and enjoy…
My business partner and I moved into a new office in September of 2013 and it was the first office we had rented that required us to arrange and pay for our own utilities. We had been in business for 8 years by this point but we had always been in managed business centres where we paid one amount per month and everything was included.
Once we had paid our deposit and got the keys, we got the whole team to pack their items, load up their cars and drive to their new home. It was an exciting time as it was a big office with multiple rooms, a meeting room, a small office for my business partner and I and a larger room for the team.
We’d not yet had our phone number ported across, but we’d had a line installed and been given a temp number so we could start working from the new place straight away. The whole place was alive with people unpacking boxes and setting up their PC’s and stuff in their new, chosen locations. Exciting times!
My business partner and I were setting things up in our little office, and once we had the desks built we started unpacking and cabling up our PC’s, and we also plugged a phone into a phone socket in the wall. Within minutes…
“Ring ring….”
The phone started ringing – which we thought was a bit spooky as we sure our number had not gone live on this new line yet – but we answered it anyway as it may have been a customer.
“Hello, this is the commercial meter registration department, I’m calling today to register your commercial meter onto the network…”
Ummm… ok?
We had not been in a position where we needed to arrange our own utilities before – as stated earlier – so in our naivety and as we were busy emptying boxes and setting our new HQ up, we were caught a little off guard. We incorrectly assumed the commercial energy world may have worked a bit differently to how the domestic energy world did. So, we listened to what the person had to say and they went through the typical mumbo jumbo you’d expect from this kind of call;
“Do you want us to go through all your options, or just go straight to the cheapest?”
Obviously we opted for the cheapest option (why wouldn’t we?)
“The cheapest option we have here is a specialist commercial energy provider called BES Utilities….”
That was the first time I had ever heard of BES Utilities, and again, in our naivety, we figured a commercial energy specialist would be the best option as its what they apparently specialised in.
We verbally agreed to go ahead, and the guy on the end of the phone went through some other info and that was that. I thanked him, and hung the phone up so I could continue unpacking boxes…
“Ring ring…. ring ring…”
“Hello, this is the commercial meter registration department, I’m calling today to register your commercial meter onto the network…”
Wait a second – we had just spoken to these guys? I informed the person we had already registered our meter, they apologised and hung up.
“Ring ring…. ring ring…”
“Hello, this is the commercial meter registration department, I’m calling today to register your commercial meter onto the network…”
Hmmmm… whats going off here? My spider sense started tingling and I started to get a bit concerned, so I turned to Google.
My heart sank…
It turns out, there is no commercial meter registration department, the commercial market works pretty much the same as the domestic market – we had been lied to, and potentially scammed.
By this point we had received BES’ details, so I gave them a call and explained I was worried we had been duped into a contract with them and expressed my concerns – I was reassured that everything was OK and they were legit and I had nothing to worry about.
They apologised for the tactics used by the salesman and explained that they didn’t have their own sales department and relied upon 3rd party energy sales brokers, and explained they had little control over them due to them all being external, unrelated companies. In reality this was a complete lie, but at this moment we didn’t know otherwise.
So we stayed with BES Utilities for a while, and over the weeks and months we continued to have problems with them.
Firstly, we found our bills were coming through with “estimated readings” on them, and whatever they were using to “estimate” the readings was WAY off. Our bills were like £300/£400 some months – bearing in mind we were a fairly small office with 8-10 people in at any time. Our bills shouldn’t have even been £100 a month, never mind £300. So they asked us to submit monthly meter readings – which we did.
This didn’t stop the estimated readings coming through, as according to their support staff “we didn’t get them in in time” Pfft.
Additionally, we were often double charged – so our £300 bill was taken twice in as many days, meaning we paid £600 for one months energy. They did have a football club to pay for, after all….
Also – as a way of protecting ourselves we cancelled our direct debit a few times so they couldn’t just take what they wanted, when they wanted it. However, they were always very quick to ring us and tell us that we had “breached our contract” and were now on “emergency rates” as the only way we were allowed to pay was via Direct Debit.
Emergency Rates are not a “thing” – We didn’t know this at the time though.
All in all, our experience with BES Utilities was a car crash from day one.
Part 2 – I Got Served
We wanted out of the contract, but we felt trapped. We couldn’t cancel the direct debit again as they claimed it violated our agreement and we had signed up for a long contract so it was proving a bit of a minefield to get out of.
So, as always I turned to my blog to rant about it and see if anyone else had experienced the same issues with BES Utilities, and to see if anyone out there could help us.
And that’s when things started to get interesting!
My blog is old – like, super old. I have been blogging for many many years (over 20yrs) so when I post an update it generally ranks well in Google organically without any SEO being done to it. And this is exactly what happened.
I started to get comments from people all over the country that had been scammed into a contract with BES Utilities just like we had, similar story each time. ‘Independent’ brokers, said some misleading stuff, got them into a contract and then BES took the mickey with charges, meter readings and so on and so forth.
I started talking to a few of these people and reposting the stories they sent me (with their permission) and things just kept snowballing from there.
After a few more blog posts were published, this website started to absolutely dominate searches on Google for anything BES related, we organically ranked above Wikipedia and some of my blog posts had been picked up and referenced on platforms like the Money Saving Expert forum – it was around this time that I spotted a huge increase in visits from Fleetwood, which is where BES Utilities are based. I was on their radar!
One day in Feb/March 2015, which I don’t recall, I received a letter from “top law firm” Field Fisher and their solicitor Bill Lister (also known as William Lister and sometimes even Stephen Lister). It said that the blog was making defamatory and libelous statements.
What was strange about this was my blog was making precisely the same allegations as an undercover BBC documentary about BES from 2012, which BES and Andrew Pilley complained to Ofcom about. Ofcom rejected a complaint by BES on the grounds the BBC’s recording was undercover and substantially true – and the author of the compliant was one………. Mr Lister!
Mr Lister’s odd behaviour aside, I responded to him at Field Fisher saying the blog posts were true and that telling him to do one. The letter worked, as their claims were baseless and meant to simply scare me, so I continued exposing the BES Utilities Scam, as I had been doing before.
Mr Bill Lister of Field Fisher did back off, and in the months after, as a result of more complaining and sending legal letters we were finally released from the contract!
However, this them seemed to open the floodgates for more legal threats, this time from a company called ERT Law, who claimed I’d not been paying my bills. They were also told to do one and we explained that we didn’t have any bills to pay as we were no longer with BES Utilities.
The blog continued to receive complaint after complaint after complaint and it was at this time Trading Standards were taking an interest in BES too. So I created a Complaint Form on my blog, which sent the form entries to BES as well as Trading Standards and Ofgem.
And boy oh boy did that form get used!
I continued to blog about BES and the huge volume of complaints and complaint forms received – and continued to do so for a good year*.
Part 3 – I Got Served (again)
On the afternoon of the 16th March 2016 I was at home and doing some jobs outside as it was a weekend and I wasn’t at work. I heard someone pull up outside my house and I went to my gate to investigate. It was a process server, and he served me a stack of legal paperwork from Berg Legal (now merged with Kennedys) on behalf of BES Commercial Energy LTD and Business Energy Solutions Ltd. The documents threatened to sue me for causing customers to breach their contracts.
Ah, shit.
It wasn’t the first time my blog had got me into legal trouble, but this was definitely a bigger deal than before and I immediately sought advice from a friend who had recently started to help me manage the 1000’s of complaints and comments being left by BES Utilities victims.
We composed a letter back to them stating we were simply discussing actual real life events that had happened and we were free to do so if we wanted to. Berg didnt agree, and this second lawsuit would be a thorn in our side for a decade.
In the next blog post I will cover the court case, and the craziness that came along with it.
*It is accepted that in some cases I may have gone a bit too far in some of the ways the blog was written, the degree of offensiveness and perhaps the photoshop of Andy Pilley as a Guantanamo Bay prisoner was in accurate – when he was a HMP Kirkham prisoner, and now a prisoner at HMP Preston. But that is still not an excuse for committing fraud – and I was pretty stressed at the time with all these customer complaints and litigation I was being threatened with.