Recently I came home to find a brown envelope containing a notice of a £60 fine for not paying the congestion charge. This was a bit of a surprise, as I registered for Congestion Charging autopay when it was introduced at the start of 2011, and have been travelling through the zone without worrying about forgetting to pay ever since. (Autopay is where they automatically charge you whenever they detect your licence plate.)
I logged in to TFL web site and found the credit card registered with them had expired. The algorithm I follow with regard to credit cards registered on various web sites is to wait for a warning email from each site, then update my registration with the replacement card expiry date.
Surely they should have sent me a warning, I thought.
Then I dimly recalled that in the many years before autopay, when I had to login daily to pay, and daily received an email receipt, I had set up a rule to automatically archive the receipts. I searched my archive and found two emails, one notifying me that my monthly payment had failed, and one a few days later saying my autopay was suspended. The suspension was a week before the fine arrived, since when I had travelled through the zone six times. I was able to pay for the current and previous days, leaving me with 4x£60 of fines for the other days.
I logged in to TFL web site and found the credit card registered with them had expired. The algorithm I follow with regard to credit cards registered on various web sites is to wait for a warning email from each site, then update my registration with the replacement card expiry date.
Surely they should have sent me a warning, I thought.
Then I dimly recalled that in the many years before autopay, when I had to login daily to pay, and daily received an email receipt, I had set up a rule to automatically archive the receipts. I searched my archive and found two emails, one notifying me that my monthly payment had failed, and one a few days later saying my autopay was suspended. The suspension was a week before the fine arrived, since when I had travelled through the zone six times. I was able to pay for the current and previous days, leaving me with 4x£60 of fines for the other days.
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