Diss BP garage falsely awards £2,000 in loyalty points to customers

A computer glitch has been blamed for a petrol station in Diss falsely awarding several customers £2,000 worth of loyalty points.

Around half a dozen customers were told they had been randomly selected to win 400,000 BPme points when they swiped their loyalty cards at BP in Old Bury Road as part of the company’s Fuel Your Year competition.

Mother-of-one Julie Williams – who had visited the petrol station on January 5, the first day the competition was rolled out – said she was left with her “stomach churning” after being told that she would not, in fact, receive the points she was promised.

The 52-year-old said: “After I used my card, the girl behind the counter said ‘oh, you’ve won’, and told me the points would be in my account within a week.

“I wasn’t aware of the promotion, so I just laughed.

“But when I got home, I looked on the website, and I started to get really excited, thinking I had won about a year’s worth of fuel.

“I thought there’s no way it could be a scam because it’s a legitimate, global company.”

Miss Williams began to suspect that something was afoot when several days passed without receiving her points.

After contacting the petrol station, she was told that a computer error had caused around half-a-dozen customers to be falsely selected as winners.

“I had spent a whole week thinking I had won over £2,000 – I was on such a high,” said Miss Williams, who works as a personal assistant at Redwings Horse Sanctuary.

“So to find out like that was devastating. I couldn’t sleep, my stomach was churning – I was so upset.”

Her account was later credited with 10,000 points, worth £50, which she was told was a consolation for her troubles.

Miss Williams, of Rectory Hill in Rickinghall, called for the competition to be stopped.

“People are not receiving their winnings,” she said. “I saw people posting online about how they had won the competition, and I felt like I needed to tell them that they weren’t going to get their points.

“BP need to be stopped from running this promotion.”

BP have since performed a U-turn and promised to honour the prizes that were handed out, but insisted that the error was the fault of a third-party supplier.

A spokesman for the multi-national oil and gas company said: “Following an error in the setup of the BP Fuel Your Year promotion, a number of our BPme customers were wrongly informed that they had won the daily prize of 400,000 BPme loyalty points.

“Despite this being a mistake by a third-party supplier, we will honour this prize for all the customers who have a receipt informing them that they were a winner.

“We are currently contacting customers who have already been in touch with us to claim their reward points.”

Customers who were told they had won can contact BPme rewards by emailing bpmerewards@bp.com.