We purchased car insurance from this company after entering our details into a comparison website. ASDA exclusive came up as one of the cheapest which also offered "the best deal". No problem setting the policy up. Paid for the full year up front. A week or so later we recieved a letter asking us to submit our license details and proof of NCD. We could send by email, fax or post.

We tried Emailing first but our emails just bounced back. We tried again the next day and zipped the scanned documents to reduce the size thinking this might have been the problem. Once again we recieved a failure notification. So I faxed them while at work.

3 days later another letter arrived threatening to cancel our policy as they had not recieved the relevant documentation, as well as this they will charge £75 to cancel plus discount any days used from the initial premium. They also state that once cancelled, we would have to disclose to the next insurer that we had been refused insurance which could see a rise in the premium.
One thing to bare in mind is that you simply cannot pick up a phone and call them.

So I faxed them the documents again, along with a covering letter stating that we were not happy with the way the whole thing was organised and that we felt we were trying to do all the things correctly but that their system was creating the means to make us default.
To be sure, I followed up by sending the documents by post.

Then I recieved an email a few days later saying that they had recieved the paperwork, but that there was a discrepancy which would cost £35 to ammend. The discrepancy?- I have a spent SP30 from November 2006 (more than 4 years previously) which I had declared, however, I had put down the 1st of November instead of the 2nd. What difference this makes to the policy I have no idea, and to be honest, I could have asked the DVLA for the points to be removed from my license but had not anticipated the anal attitude of these people.

Again I had the option of paying up or cancelling the policy and incurring the financial penalty.

I have subsequently read reivews of people having very similar problems as myself, until then I thought that I had been the victim of individual misfortune, I now feel I am the victim of a calculated "scam".

Reading the T&C's which I guess we all should do but rarely bother with, they make the point about every "i " dotted and "t "crossed, and they go out of their way to use this against you to the full.
They must make quite a lot of money with very little risk through selling policies then either saying they have not recieved documentation and collecting the cancellation fee or finding the smallest error and creating a large penalty charge.

I am not talking about people who fraudulently and knowingly attempt to get insurance by lying about their circumstances, but where a very minor error has been made and there is no difference to the risk rating of the proposer or the cost of the policy.

I am now awaiting the result of a letter to their customer complaints department before I pay them any more money, but as I am still on a time limit before they go ahead and cancel, it may be that my tenure with ASDA Exclusive is brief.

I would not encourage anyone to take out a policy with this company after my experiences and hope that the financial watchdogs take umbridge with them for not adhering to the spirit of the law, though they may be skating just on the edge of what is actually legal. It certainly does not make good customer service and I'm surprised a huge company like WalMart who owns ASDA allows it.