The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has stated it will begin to apply penalties to companies with more than 25 Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) cases.

Planning to introduce a £350 surcharge for each mis-sold PPI package, the charge will apply to all companies with 25 or more cases as well as the existing £500 per-case charge.

The new charge is being proposed to cope with the costs of handling the rising number of PPI mis-selling cases. The FOS reported in a newsletter in November that it had started receiving 3,000 new complaints a week.

Large banks, including Lloyds, Royal Bank ofScotlandandSantander, last year set aside billions of pounds to refund disgruntled PPI customers.

Sally Bowyer, Managing Director of financial claims specialist BrunelFranklin.com says that the public are slowly becoming wiser to the tactics of mis-selling, but that a lot of the damage is already done: “It is important to realise that we may all unwittingly have taken out PPI during the years when lenders were offering a seemingly endless line of credit in the form of loans and credit cards in particular. It costs nothing to check your paperwork for insurances that you may not even know you are paying for. PPI per se is not a bad product, however the onus is on the vendor to ensure the product is the best for your needs at the time of sale. If the best product for your needs was not offered, or if you were unaware of the true cost, for example, you may have grounds for a refund.”

Learn more about PPI refunds and find out if you could apply for a refund today! Visit the website www.brunelfranklin.com or call Brunel Franklin, free, on 0800 051 54 51.