Deafness and Dramas

Been having a bit of a struggle over last few months.

1. I boobed on a change of insurer. Due to the fact of crook hearing I could not cancel the old insurer but I had already signed up with the new one for our car.

My memory being what it is at times, I forgot I still had the old insurance going on the car. Then the payments started (we pay by the month) with the new insurer. So you can guess what happened. We ended up with double insurance on our vehicle.

It was just as well we did not have to claim on our car insurance for the first few months. So I rang the new insurer and explained what I had done and could we possibly cancel with them. (We had already paid for four months with them!)

They realized having insurance on one car with 2 insurers was technically illegal. Therefore they were most cooperative in organizing the cancellation of the policy we had with them and EVENTUALLY!! We got the payments we had made refunded...more than $AUD200. Now Number 2 problem.

2. Our old E-tag died (E-tags in Australia are for payment of Toll road fees automatically, electronically as your vehicle passed the detectors.) This was maybe due to the battery dying seeing it was 13 years old.

We got this funny Notice for an unpaid Toll charge. I clicked on the e-mail link that came with the message and it looked really funny! A weird name for the sender of the e-mail. We think it was some sort of scammer.

As a result we thought the E-tag account got hacked even before we updated to the new tag on our car. Subsequently we kept getting notices from RMS* (formerly RTA+) about an inability for the E-tag usage to be funded from our account.

Well I made an initial trip to RMS about the matter and cutting a long story short the staffer seemed to think she had fixed the problem. NOT SO! We then got 2 more RMS Notices about inability to access our bank account.

As I said above we think the E-tag account got hacked somehow. I have now put the matter in the hands of our local State member. She wrote to us the other day and told us she had passed on our info to The Honourable Duncan Gay State Minister for Roads or Transport and Marine I think.

The Local Member put a note in hand writing on her official letter to us ..."Boy, what an ordeal you both have been through." I forgot to say we did make a second trip to the Office in Penrith over the matter and being unsuccessful I decided to get the Local member to handle it.

In all fairness we have not received any outstanding penalty notices for unpaid Tolls as yet. I imagine once it gets sorted out there might be a heap of charges on the account or may hap they will just give us a clean slate! We can hope!.