Insurance companies enjoy a chequered reputation. Direct Line have just managed to do something interesting. A letter arrived telling me that they were going to renew my insurance automatically. It seems that, without my knowledge, they had stored my credit card details. They had also awarded themselves a mandate to deduct from it every year, again without my knowledge.
I complained, of course, but got nowhere. I then complained to Barclaycard who said "what do you expect us to do?"
I would have thought that this was fraud. Apparently the rules are different for insurance companies.
