On Sat we received a phone call from my MIL very upset because she’d been told there was a chance she may not get the life insurance policy my FIL had put into for almost a decade because there was an outstanding payment of £250 upon the account that dated back to August. Apparently the payments had been cancelled then. This tallied up with when my FIL’s brain tumour was started to mess with him and he was doing crazy internet things like ordering odd wires he didn’t need and making spreading sheets of random words. He’d asked me to help him pay a credit card bill at the time because his bank app confused him, etc. So we thought in this confusion he’s cancelled it. I told her to come over and I’d speak to them as she doesn’t feel very confident dealing with them.
Now for context when I first called the life insurance folks back in Dec, it became apparent the solicitors they had used for they wills had already notified them with the wrong details. The death date was wrong and so were a few other key items like his date of birth. I ended up rectifying them and was told the payment would be made in 10 days.
Fast forward today: The life insurance company tells me we need to contact another company who previously owned them because our policy was taken out before 2005. I was like ‘uh I’m staring at the date right now and it was 2017’ – then she kept repeatedly saying you need to ring the other company.
Fine so I did. They had absolutely no record of the policy at all on their files expect for two pensions I had squared away. So I go back to the insurance company. At this point MIL is getting upset so I’m a bit bitchy on the phone when I explain this story to the new representative I’m dealing with. We go back and forth on a few details and she puts me on hold to talk to her supervisor. The phone call gets cut off, I ring her back as she’s ringing me back.
We finally connect and I gave her the death cert details, she told me there’s been a horrible mistake on their part and they’re terribly sorry for all the drama surrounding this and MIL should not have been sent the letter in the first place.
Then she explained what had happened…
When the solicitors originally notified the life insurance people of FIL’s passing, they sent the wrong fucking death certificate to the company, and it had been assigned to FIL’s file. The death certificate was for a man of the same name in the same area, who had died in the June. The reason MIL got the letter about outstanding payments was because the DEAD MAN hadn’t been paying his policy payments because he was DEAD. He had taken his policy out before 2005 which was why we had been re-routed to the other company.
The lovely representative who I had given shit to in the beginning had taken the time we were disconnected to go through paperwork attached to the file and realised the policy number/death cert number didn’t match the one on their file and uncovered the mistake. She then rectified it and now they are fast tracking the payment.
She does not have to pay any additional money and will get the full amount.
You honestly could not write this shit.
