Salty electricity and gas bills, Enel in the sights of the AGCM: “The renewal emails were artfully crafted to end up in spam”

#Salty #electricity #gas #bills #Enel #sights #AGCM #renewal #emails #artfully #crafted #spam

The Antitrust announced in its latest bulletin that it has started a new investigation into Enel, already fined last year, to understand whether the renewal policy could be configured as an unfair commercial practice.

In recent months, many users have been receiving very high Enel bills, almost all linked to a change in the contractual conditions made by Enel unilaterally upon expiry of the contract.

Enel had every right to change the conditions of the contract upon its natural expiry, not even the Draghi Decree which protected users for a certain period could block the normal renewal of the conditions upon expiry, however it seems that the communication that was supposed to signal to consumers the increase, therefore also the possibility of changing manager if these were not accepted, never arrived.

“Some users report that they regularly receive invoices via email (or on the app), but that they have not received any communication of renewal of the economic conditions through the aforementioned channels and that they have randomly found an email in the spam folder, coming from Enel Energia, at which was attached to the communication of renewal, following the expiry, of the economic conditions of supply”, writes the authority in the bulletin.

A rather suspicious situation, and the investigation would have been started to verify some suspicions: according to the Agcm “the email in question would have been handcrafted to be intercepted by the anti-spam filter of email clients also due to the relevance of the graphic part; the same, in fact, lent itself to being interpreted as a mere promotional message and not as a document having a significant impact on the supply contract, which was also taken into account neither in the header nor in the textual part of said email, no evidence was given to its object (i.e., the modification of economic conditions)”.

Enel would therefore have acted on purpose, and the suspicion that everything was planned precisely to make profits from last winter also comes from the timing of many renewals, which started last year at the end of winter. Many people, faced with very low bills due to practically zero consumption in the months that include spring, summer and the first part of autumn, would not have asked themselves the problem of the contract or renewal and would have found themselves faced with a fait accompli this winter, with the problem that a change of supplier to try to stop the damage would have been a late intervention.