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Problem with Sanef


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If you have one of those French Sanef telepeage (not the UK ones) and you decide to cancel the contract, they will ask for the thing back so they can refund your 30 euro deposit. We have just done this and I would advise anyone doing the same in the future to be very aware of their underhand tactics.

They ask that it is sent by registered post, fair enough. So went to the post office with the telepeage plus the form requesting cancellation all put in the same envelope and sealed properly, spent £8.10 on international tracked and signed for delivery. Tracked the thing on the post office website and a few days later it shows as delivered. Good I thought I'll soon have my deposit back.

A week or so later I received an e-mail from Sanef we have received your letter of cancellation but can you now send the telepeage to get your deposit back, now when we exchanged one a few years ago when the battery was getting a bit low we popped into the office at Amiens toll, the lady there as soon as we gave her the thing scanned it into her machine bringing up our details, she then scanned the new one in to our account. Now I don't 100% know how they do things at the main office when Sanef receive these back but I would hope the procedure is the same. If so either the telepeage got lost in the trip to France highly unlikely as the form would as well, or they are trying to get out of paying  the deposit back. In any event if you send anything back to them make sure it is secure in the package and make sure it sent by recorded delivery as they will try and get out of it and KEEP the post office receipt.

Us, we sent them a scan of the receipt and have had confirmation of the return of our deposit, but don't send it as an attachment as either they can't or won't open attachments. In the end I had to scan it into Word and cut and paste that into the e-mail reply so the poor little souls can read it.

So unless you can prove it was sent they won't refund, even if they receive it.

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They probably have a company policy that attachments can only be opened from a secure source, and a person claiming to be a customer is not a secure source.

This minimises the risks of someone downloading a Trojan into their system - with all the chaos that would then cause.
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Our SANEF box died a death earlier this year. I phoned them and they said that, given its age, it needed replacing and they would send a new one to us at our UK address. As we were in France at the time, this was a bit of an inconvenience as Mr Betty was driving home alone, but they needed us to jump through a few hoops to post it to France, which wasn't worth the hassle, so he managed, and the new box arrived very promptly. They asked that when we received it, we returned the old one within (from memory) 14 days. Mr Betty posted it back without going to any special trouble - not recorded or signed for or any other such costly stuff.

As our new one works fine and we heard nothing further - and I remember there were threatened consequences for not returning it - I can only assume they received it and were happy.

So, the OP may have had problems, but we don't seem to have suffered any.
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Betty, Not sure if it was just our bad luck but it seems hard to believe it could have gone walkabout on a tracked and signed for package before it arrived at its destination. Even though the cancellation letter arrived safely in the same envelope, does make you think.

If it was just a return to base and no deposit due I would have done as your hubby did, and let them argue the toss if it didn't arrive.

As we have heard scare stories from our French friends about company's swearing blind they haven't received this letter or that parcel I wanted to be sure I had proof of posting. In the end it proved valuable insurance.

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Point totally taken, Steve.

We had a similar problem a few years back with the Centre des Impots in Lille telling our local Tresor that they hadn't received the cheque we sent for the Taxe d'habitation. That evolved into one of the most protracted and farcical sequence of events, which I've recounted here previously.

Similarly, I went into our insurance brokers offices and personally handed over a cheque for our house and car insurance, could trace that it had been cashed, and yet I continued to receive payment demands for three months after that, despite numerous phone calls and assurances that all was well, culminating in a final demand and threat of cancellation of all the policies, huissier, the whole shebang....

Wrote my fifth rather terse email, requested written and phone confirmation that payment HAD been received, and eventually got that AND a written apology.

It happens, of course, but I'm inclined to blame incompetence rather than any more sinister motives. ?
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