*DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES TRUST THIS COMPANY.* They entered my house without permission and fraudulently billed me over $400 for an emergency after-hours service call that I NEVER REQUESTED. Reader, there was no emergency and they never even had the courtesy to call to check if there was or to request permission to ENTER MY HOME, at night, without my knowledge. This is absolute insanity - my house is in a quiet wooded area and the thought that I could have been there alone and men just showed up at my door at night, uninvited and unannounced, is frankly terrifying.
I've been a customer for 10 years for my vacation home in Jamaica, but Cota & Cota has now completely betrayed my trust. Having stored my door lock code in their files after a prior (legitimate) service visit, they just let themselves in, did god knows what (again, THERE WAS NO EMERGENCY), and then sent me a $400+ bill. That is completely unacceptable, a grievous betrayal of trust and, by the way, illegal.
Cota & Cota's excuse for why they did this isn't any better either - after being an auto-delivery propane customer for about 10 years, without any notice to me, Cota switched my account to COD, meaning I'd have to call them to request delivery. I had no idea, SINCE THEY DIDN'T INFORM ME OF THIS ILLEGAL CHANGE TO MY ACCOUNT (yes, that's illegal under VT law too), and then they didn't make a propane delivery to my house for 11 months. Well according to Cota, they just spontaneously realized one day that they hadn't made a delivery in a while and probably should have, so they decided that my tank must be empty, our heat must be off, and it was February so my pipes could freeze! They realized that would be 100% their fault, since they had illegally switched my account from auto-delivery to COD, but instead of calling to CHECK if there was a problem with the heat, they ran right over to my house at night, illegally entered my home and then billed me for an "emergency" after hours "call" that I NEVER REQUESTED OR AUTHORIZED. I wasn't there at the time (thank god), but I have a webcam in the house which shows a digital reading of the internal temperature in the house and could easily have let them know if there was a problem (there wasn't).
Mind you, I only got this version of the story after about 6 calls to Cota to sort out the billing issue for the "emergency after-hours call". I was blatantly lied to by three different people before being transferred to Jason Terry, the manager, who then told me the "truth" (which I highly doubt is actually the truth).
I won't even get into the very shady delivery of propane that they subsequently made, in which they had struck out the metered price on the delivery ticket and manually increased it by over 50 cents per gallon, but that certainly looks very suspicious to me too and we have reason to believe that the number of gallons billed were not actually delivered.
Consider yourself warned, especially if you are an owner of a vacation home in their service area. We have to trust local service people when we can't be there, but Cota & Cota has proven that they do not deserve that trust and should be avoided. read more