Paula Luckhoff
| Consumer ninja Wendy Knowler follows up with Wesbank after a client unwittingly paid thousands for cover she didn’t want.
Wendy Knowler has regularly reported on the way consumers get duped into signing up for contracts they don’t actually want during telesales calls.
In some cases they don’t even know that they have been signed up.
What recourse do you have if the agent tweaked the script and got the sale by misleading you?
In practice, very little says the consumer journo.
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In many of the telesales complaints she has taken up companies do assist by providing the recording of the call says Knowler, but:
… a lot of the time corporates oblige, and then it comes down to ‘oh it was a rogue telesales agent, they deviated from the script’.
Wendy Knowler, Consumer journalist
In her case study this week that appears in fact, to have been the case.
“But why it wasn’t picked up earlier is the issue for me.”
In this instance a former Wesbank client (after paying off her car loan a year before) realised she’d ended up unwittingly paying a cumulative R2 665 for Road Protect for a period of over two years.
She only picked this up and contacted Wesbank in July 2020 when she was double-debited R95.
It all stems from a sales call she received in 2018 when she was still servicing the car loan from someone who introduced himself as calling from “Road Protect on behalf of Wesbank”.
The recording makes for horrifying listening. The agent did not specifically ask her if she agreed to R95 being added to her monthly Wesbank instalment…
Wendy Knowler, Consumer journalist
When Tracy raised the issue in July 2020… she was told by a Wesbank agent ‘I have listened to the call recording and the consultant from road protect did advise of the R95 premium.’
Wendy Knowler, Consumer journalist
The debit order was then stopped.
But no-one at Wesbank raised a red flag about the contents of the call – how badly Tracy and no doubt others were misled – and there was no talk of a refund.
Wendy Knowler, Consumer journalist
Listen to Knowler detail the client’s experience and Wesbank’s response:
This article first appeared on CapeTalk : What can you do if telesales agent gets the sale by misleading you?
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