Hi,

I'd like to know if anyone else has had a similar experience or has any advice.  In a nutshell, Slingshot have wrongly referred us to a debt recovery agency.

Here's the details of the situation:

We moved house in January, we were with Slingshot and informed them of the move and that we wanted to get UFB.  They didn't put things in place to make the move in time, but that was ok, we waited. After that minor delay we experiences a series of errors on Slingshot's part... 
-The modem was not sent out.
- I called to check on the status of the modem and discovered it had not been sent. The request was submitted and I was told I would hear back from the team involved that day. I did not receive a call back to update me on that situation - the modem was sent by courier with an incorrect address on it. The suburb was wrong, so it sat in the courier's depot for 5 days until I rang again to check on it. I went to collect it myself from the depot.
- Slingshot did not communicate with the Chorus technician effectively in arranging installation. I did this myself and called him directly.
- Upon completion of the work by the Chorus technician, he advised the Slingshot representative that it was all ready to go. Slingshot confirmed they would complete the connection within the hour. 7 hours later it was still not on, so I rang again.
- When calling again I was told the connection could take up to 7pm to go live, this was before even checking my account or asking for any account details to do so
- When I insisted that the representative check that my account was in fact ready to go, he did so, and discovered there was still a problem with the Slingshot part of the process not being completed. He did it for me whilst I was on hold and the internet was finally working
- We're were on fibre, which is supposed to be faster, but it was running slower than our old ADSL connection.
- I got in touch again and they agreed to waive the first month's charges as compensation and looked into the speed issues.
- Then we noticed our phone line wasn't working and got in touch again.  They informed us that this was because the number hadn't been ported over properly and they sorted it out within a few days
- Then our internet stopped working and again we called up and tried the usual power cycle stuff to get it going again, but they couldn't fix it.  They told us they would send a new modem out and a courier bag for the old one.  - New modem was sent, but in the meantime we decided we'd had enough of all the problems - it was getting to be around 2 months from when we moved house and we still hadn't had proper internet or phone service.  So we phoned them up and terminated the contract.  We were told this wouldn't be a problem, we asked about charges and were told we would not be charged because of the significant amount of mistakes made on Slingshot's part.  They would also send a courier bag for the modem.
- Neither of the two courier bags arrived. (I still have both the modems boxed up and ready to give back!) Having had so much poor experience with them and their terrible communication and failure to action requests we called up the next day again to confirm that our account was being cancelled, without any charges.
- They said they had no record of the previous call, but would action that request, again confirming there would be no charges.
- We started receiving bills.  We phoned them, explained the situation and each time was told to ignore the bill, it was a mistake, we didn't have anything outstanding on our account.
- This happened 2 or 3 times.  Each time we were told we had nothing to worry about, we could ignore the bills.
- Next thing we were contacted by a Credit Consultants - Slingshot had passed the debt on to them for recovery.
- I tried to explain the situation to Credit Consultants, they were less than helpful and in one instance incredibly rude.  They sent the dispute back to Slingshot.
- Slingshot are still claiming we owe the money and Credit Consultants have told us we will have to lodge a dispute with the Dispute Tribunal, but that this has already put a "Default" on my credit reference.


I'm so incredibly disappointed by this whole situation - it's not even about the money so much; it's not a bank breaking amount, but I refuse to pay it when we don't owe it.  Apart from anything else, we only had internet service for around 10 days with all the problems we had and they're claiming 3 months worth of services plus a termination fee.

Can anyone help or advise?

Thanks