For more than thirty-five years I have worked with businesses. Small ones, large ones, serious ones, less serious ones, some that closed and some that deserved to. I thought I had seen everything. I thought.

Yesterday showed me that “everything” still has room in it. And because on this blog I hand out advice about what to watch for when you trust your money to third parties, the incident belongs here. Not as a rant, or at any rate not only as a rant, but as a lesson.

Let us start with the facts

Two years ago my partner tried to sign up, through the Cosmote website, for a Cosmote TV Cinema package that included a Netflix account. She followed the site’s instructions to the letter. The package was never activated. No connection, no login, not one second of viewing.

So she went to the nearest Germanos store, which serves that provider. The person there told her the right thing to do was to cancel the online request and open a new one from the store. He assured her he had cancelled it, and opened a new subscription for her, plain Cosmote TV Cinema, no Netflix. That subscription is live to this day, it is paid every month, and we enjoy the content. Up to here, no complaints.

Yesterday we went to the same store for something unrelated: to move the home internet and landline to Cosmote, Telekom now, replacing the old provider. The assistant informed us it could not be done. There is, she said, a debt of about 300 euros on my partner’s tax number. The store cannot see why the debt exists, cannot settle it, and referred us to 13888, the Cosmote customer service line.

And here is the first detail that should have made somebody, anywhere inside that organisation, stop and think: the debt was indeed on her tax number, but the name displayed against it was a different one. A surname spelled differently, a different first name. One tax number, two people. Hold on to that, we will need it.

The phone call

We called 13888. The first person who answered, after the familiar notice that the call is recorded, found the debt: it was the package with Netflix. The one that was never activated and that the store had assured her was cancelled.

Instead of telling us when the supposed package started, when it ended and what exactly had been charged, she told us the store employee “wanted to avoid something”. What exactly he wanted to avoid, she did not explain. We had not asked, and we did not care. We were asking about 300 euros; she was commenting on the staff of other stores. When we explained that no login had ever taken place and that the service was never delivered, she said she would file a request for it to be settled. Fine. After a long conversation, the line cut out without warning.

We called again. A colleague of hers answered, because that is how it works: whoever is free picks up and you start from zero. We told him the whole story from the beginning. He reached exactly the same conclusion as the previous one: it was that particular package. And immediately afterwards he informed us that nothing can be done, because six months have passed.

“What do you mean, nothing can be done?”

There is no process for that, he said. Nobody can help.

Read that again. The same company, on the same phone line, within one hour: one employee says she is filing a settlement request, the other declares that settlement does not exist. Both of them, I assume, are looking at the same system.

We pressed. Once I had made it clear that a business that size must have a procedure for problems it created itself, he put us on hold to look for “whether there is somebody in charge”. I warned him the line had already cut once, so if it cut again, they should call us on the mobile. “Of course”, he replied.

The line cut within half a minute. Nobody ever called. I am keeping the “of course” as a souvenir.

What I am not saying

Before I say what I think, let me say what I am not claiming, because in this country describing what happened to you carries its own cost.

I am not claiming anybody meant to rob us. I am not claiming the store employee lied; perhaps he pressed the button he was told to press and the system did its own thing. I do not know what happened behind the scenes and, to be honest, it is not my job to find out. It is theirs.

What I am claiming is this, and all of it is fact: a service that was never delivered produces a debt of about 300 euros. The debt is filed against a tax number under somebody else’s name. In two years, the company never once notified us it existed. Two employees on the same line give opposite answers. And the official position, in the end, is that the six months have passed.

The six months. So the company creates the problem, does not tell the customer it exists, six months go by, and then the deadline is held against them. That goes into the collection too, next to the “of course”. It is like a hotel billing a guest for a room they never entered and, when they object, telling them they should have complained before they found out. Kafka’s K. at least knew why he was on trial. No, he did not know either. Let us leave the man alone, he had, or has, problems of his own.

On the phone, at that point, I used a word I will not write here. The call is recorded, as they themselves informed us, so it is in their archives; let them look it up. I will replace it with something more elegant: in more than thirty-five years of working with businesses I have never seen a circus like it. Apologies for the circus, too.

What the law says, so this is not just a feeling

That was the story. From here on it is the articles, because a sense of injustice convinces nobody and the law occasionally does.

First the six months, because that is where the conversation locked. They did not tell me where it is written. I looked for it myself. In the General Authorisations Regulation and in the telecoms regulator’s Code of Conduct I found no deadline that closes the discussion at six months. I may have missed it; I am not a lawyer. If it exists, let them show it to me in writing and this article will be corrected the same day. Until then, “the six months have passed” is a sentence without a citation, and sentences without citations do not close cases.

What I did find says rather the opposite. The Code of Conduct of the Greek telecoms regulator, published in the government gazette on 24/06/2022, requires the provider to ensure “the prompt, effective and fair resolution of complaints” and to answer “in a documented manner to every complaint”. Two employees with opposite answers within one hour, and no written answer to this day, are hard to describe in those words.

Time, as the Civil Code counts it. Article 250 opens with the words “the following claims are time-barred after five years” and its first case covers the claims “of merchants, manufacturers and craftsmen, for goods supplied, for work performed”. Five years, then, as an outer limit, for the company’s claim. Six months, under their own policy, for my right to discuss it. I am not saying one cancels the other; the law does not work that way. I am saying that two clocks on the same matter, one running ten times faster than the other, call for an explanation.

And one provision I would like explained to me in writing. Article 6 paragraph 2 of Law 3471/2006 concerns traffic data retained for billing purposes, and states:

“This processing is permitted only until the end of the period within which the bill may lawfully be challenged or payment may be pursued.”

I will not make it sound stronger than it is. The provision governs the data, not whether the debt is owed, and the “or” is disjunctive. The question still stands, though, and it is the first one going into my written complaint: since you tell me the challenge period has closed, on which period do you rely to keep the pursuit of payment open?

The tax number with the wrong name is neither a typo nor a detail. GDPR requires personal data to be accurate and kept up to date, and gives a right to rectification. It also gives something more useful, the right of access: one email to the company’s data protection officer asking for a copy of everything they hold about you, the first copy at no charge, with an answer due within one month. It is the quietest way to make an organisation bring into the light what the phone line could not find.

And since I said it once, I will say it again: this is not legal advice. I am showing you where each item is written, with the law and the article beside it, so you know what to ask.

What you should watch for

The article was not written so I could vent; I made that clear at the start. It was written because all of the above could have been avoided with five habits that cost nothing:

  1. Every cancellation, in writing. Ask for a confirmation email or a reference number. “I cancelled it” spoken aloud proves nothing, not for you and not for the employee who most likely believed it himself.
  2. Once a month, look at your account. Not the amount you pay, but what exactly is registered against your tax number. The companies’ apps show it. We never looked, because the subscription we were paying for worked perfectly well. Our mistake. Mind you, as we were told on the phone, that tax number carried three records. One with the wrong name and a balance, one with the right name and a working subscription, and one whose contents they did not even tell us about. With the “organisation” we enjoyed, I hope the file holds no further surprises for us.
  3. Your tax number under somebody else’s name is not a detail. It is a personal data matter and you are entitled to a written explanation of how it arose, along with the correction.
  4. On a service line, ask for a reference number before you say anything else. And immediately after the call, send an email summarising what was said. The line will cut. It always cuts. Yes, that is exactly why the Request Receipt exists in Ekkremés, our own organisation platform, but that is another article.
  5. “The six months have passed” is not a law of nature. It is internal policy. There is EETT for telecoms, there is the Consumer Ombudsman who mediates free of charge, there is the Hellenic Data Protection Authority for the data side, and there is a written complaint to the company itself with proof of receipt. All three authorities are far stronger if the written complaint to the company has come first, so the written one goes first. That is where we are going next week.

And a door left open

The details of the case, the tax number and the dates and times of the calls, are available to the company at any time. They have the calls recorded themselves, after all.

If Cosmote, or Telekom, or whatever it is called by the time this text is published, wants to reply, the blog is open and its reply will be published verbatim and unedited, beside this article. I would genuinely be glad to write the “happily, it was resolved” piece too.

And since I mentioned it: the joke about the name is not a joke. Cosmote’s move to the parent company’s brand is being completed right now, with the campaign peaking on 8 September. The signs change, the logos, the colour, the app. I hope that along with the magenta, the record with the wrong name changes too.

Until then, the collection grows. And we, until further notice, owe 300 euros for nothing. As, it seems, any of us might.

If in your own work you often ask clients for details, files or confirmations and later nobody remembers who said what, that is what Ekkremés organises, our platform for accountants, lawyers, engineers, estate agents and freelancers. Every request to a client keeps a history that cannot be changed, when it was sent and when it was opened, and it prints as a document if the client later says they never saw it. Send me what work you do and what you usually wait for from your clients through the contact form, and I will show you how it would fit into Ekkremés.

The whole picture: this article covers one part of a larger subject. If you are after the whole of it, from beginning to end, it is in the guide to security and legal on your website.