Most people should now be familiar with Tiscali's never-ending billing problems. So much for trying to solve them, Tiscali has now called in the debt collectors on its own customers, this despite it being the ISPs fault!:

Said one hacked-off Tiscali customer, who's received a demand even though she downgraded to a pay as you go service a year ago: "It would appear that Tiscali has a billing fiasco on their hands and are now erroneously threatening members with a debt collection agency."

Another punter who aired the matter on one of the ISP's bulletin boards said: "Tiscali informed me recently that they had finally sorted out my account and would be taking out the due money by direct debit. I pay all my bills and have never had bad credit.

Today I received, without any notification, a demand for payment of £73 from a debt collection agency. I have no idea who this agency is...could be a spoof for all I know. I have had no demands for payment or "final demands" from Tiscali. It is worrying the way Tiscali go about business."

Two of our own readers have already reported this; indeed it came as little surprise to see Tiscali enter our ISP complaints page again yesterday.

The good news, we think, is that Tiscali claims the e-mails weren't the correct ones and should not have been issued. Unfortunately this doesn't help, now we only end up wondering what the 'correct' one would have been.

Tiscali has had well documented billing problems for as long as we can remember and has clearly failed to solve all of them. The poor treatment of customers by support staff doesn't help and only makes the ISP appear ever more incompetent. More @ The Register.