Here are some recent letters. We invite you to tell us your story by sending it in to us.

I just wanted other people out there to know what happened to my parents both of whom are disabled. My father on more than one occasion responded to direct mailings or agreed to demonstration days with cold callers over the telephone despite my protestations. He had bought everything from £10 bags of cheap soap worth £2 max from cold calling "Blind" charities to £295 scale reducer that does not work on his heating system. The worst event resulted in him ordering an electric riser armchair on a 26% APR credit agreement for £4250. The company was a well known company that advertises in fliers in national press. My mother said that the representative would not leave until he bought the chair and then to cap it off drove him to the Building Society to collect the deposit in cash. The finance company had no idea he was 72 years old. They assumed he was under 65 years old as the finance forms clearly had that upper age limit printed on them. They said that had received multiple complaints about the company prior to my call and were considering withdrawing their credit arrangements. The chair was allegedly a one-off but was in fact just a standard chair. The first I knew of it was way after the 7 day cooling off period for cold callers and credit agreements. However I got their money back because I am a member of Which and knew their consumer rights. They ordered a 23" width chair and the company delivered a 21" chair i.e. they were in breach of contract. My mother has bought a chair within the last month that cost just £800 from a local disability store. Buyer beware. Do your research. Know your rights. I do not know how these so called sales people sleep at night when they use these kind of tactics on a generation often too polite or too confused to say no.

Brenda Jeffries
Bognor Regis

I'm pleased that there is somewhere for people to vent their frustration at the way some of these companies are ripping customers off. My father (who is 87) bought a scooter from a company that advertised in a national newspaper. It works fine, but we were really upset when we discovered a few weeks after he had purchased it, he could have bought the almost exact same product from a company in his home town for over £1000 less! I know that it is our fault for not looking closely enough in the first place, but are these companies taking advantage of elderly and disabled people by charging these sort of prices? Surely they can make enough money by charging a reasonable price? Anyway, our message to anyone reading this is to make sure that they price they are paying isn't far more than a local company could sell them a product for.

Mr G Graham, Lincolnshire

 

We had to laugh when we read the details on the site regarding how salesmen try to get you to buy the products. Exactly the same thing happened to us when we were looking for a bed. The salesman used the discount trick and we almost went for it. We were pleased we didn't though as we found the local stockist could sell us a similar bed for £500 less than the salesman had told us was his best price! He was with us for nearly three hours too and we found it very difficult to get rid of him.

Mrs Penryn, London

 

We would encourage anyone to try to find a local supplier after our experience. The scooter we bought went wrong only 2 weeks after we had bought it from a company who told us that they had nation-wide coverage if there was a problem. It took us endless phone calls and 3 weeks to get someone out to fix it and then it wasn't anyone from the company we bought it from. Apparently they don't have any of their own engineers and pay someone else to do the jobs.

Mr Rose, Manchester