Negative tariff signup payments are an avenue for customer abuse

[jecollins]

Brokers have discovered that they can make money by charging signup fees and then revoking the tariffs before the customers have had an opportunity to recover the fees in lower rates.

[jecollins]

For the moment, customers insist on amortizing signup payments over the minimum time until tariff revocation, which is six hours. In the longer term, such payments should be subject to a pro-rated refund on revocation.

[jecollins]

We have decided for 2015 to specify that negative signup payments (when the customer pays the broker) must be fully refunded if the tariff is ever revoked.

[jecollins]

The fix makes the refund on tariff unsubscribe. This means that refunds go out on tariff revocation (because the tariff revocation process involves unsubscribing from the revoked tariff) as well as on any other unsubscribe event. This will prevent a potential attack where a broker could get customers to pay a negative signup fee, then offer another tariff better than the one with the negative signup, attracting some customers who have already paid the fee, then revoking both of them.