**Ripped off, manipulated and scammed by shell energy posting to hopefully prevent this happening to others** Today we were in court with our (now previous) energy provider #shellenergy formerly known as First utility. To start at the beginning, First Utility supplied our energy for a full year hastle free. We moved house, switched back to them in the new property, sent reads, set up a direct debit, everything you are meant to do. Almost 2 years later in March 2017 our direct debit increased by £280 per month! Without any notification or prior warning or even a reason. Obviously we queried this at the first opportunity and froze my direct debits, continuing to put my payments into savings until they rectified the issue. The events that followed have consumed our life for 2 and a half years. They claimed that we were using excess of 20 units of electricity per day and that when they assessed our account 14 months after signing up they realised this but only increased the direct debit by £10. Two months later they realised it wasn't enough and put the account up for reassessment and a further 3 months after that they decided we owed them back pay of almost 2 years and we were using twice the electricity that we have PROVED we were using! We contacted the ombudsman services who ruled in our favour initially, instructing a deduction in the money they were asking for as they had not handled our account correctly and the accumulation of a bill was their fault. #shellenergy agreed to apply initially, and we waited for them to contact us with a new bill. 2 days before christmas 2017 they decided to appeal the OS decision on the grounds that we had apparently stolen a SMART meter and had not issued them with final readings (I have all the documentation that proves #shellenergy arranged the SMART meter AND supplied the codes to activate it - they also took the final reads and generated an invoice that they later tried to hide. (In addition to this, once the SMART meter was installed the imperial meter was meant to be held for a max period of 6 months so it could be tested for faults. #shellenergy scrapped our imperial meter to avoid it being tested. To give you a picture our SMART meter shows average daily use of about 15 units per day PEAK. The imperial was showing 20 units per day in summer. It was clearly faulty). We challenged the Ombudsman services and had their original decision reinstated!!! However #shellenergy managed to appeal once again and had the case shut down. At a complete loss we went to them personally and offered to pay the bill minus the back bill that the OS stated they should deduct. They refused. They threatened us with collection procedures that would include CCJs or Bailiffs. I have a business and 3 young children, I can't afford CCJs against my name and certainly dont want my children to experience bailiffs turning up at the door! and so the only option left to avoid that from happening was for us to take them to court as the claimant or pay what they were asking, well in excess of what we owed. What we didn't realise in all of this, and we found out today that although #shellenergy have proven they are a liability in the sense that, in more ways than 1, they are reckless and complacent with customers accounts, in the eyes of the law we can only claim back from money they are seeking from us on top of the bill. So to put into context what they have done, is allowed us to accumulate a huge debt (luckily for us the money was put aside), threatened us with bailiffs and CCJs knowing the only way out was to take them to court, knowing all they would have to do is sit back and allow it to play out! Morally and on principle we won! The judge made it clear he was unimpressed by the way they have handled this and allowed it to drag out. Unfortunately the law doesn't run on morals and this time they had the knowledge and the upper hand! To add to this, to make matters worse, in the process of trying to resolve this we have had members of #shellenergy staff laugh at us, we have been accused of being bill Dodgers, in transcripts we have been described as "super awkward people" we have been accused of being aggressive and were even told by one member of staff he would personally make sure the back bill deduction was NOT applied. They have caused so much stress to our family and consumed so much of our time I want to put this put there to warn everyone to steer clear! Read the reviews online about #firstutility. It isn't surprising they have tried to re brand.