When you look back on 2009, what will you remember? Barack Obama’s inauguration, the panic over swine flu, the worst global recession for decades, the death of Michael Jackson?

For some Times Money readers, whose stories we featured in these pages, the past year will stick in their memories for more personal reasons. Since January we have highlighted the cases of hundreds of readers who have faced financial crises. As the year draws to a close, we revisit a selection to find out how they have coped.

Combating mis-selling

In the summer the Financial Services Authority, the City regulator, announced plans to abolish commission payments, which have been at the heart of successive mis-selling scandals. And evidence uncovered by Times Money in the past year suggests that it can’t happen quickly enough.

Among the cases we covered was the sale of a risky investment bond to Clive Middleton’s 80-year-old mother by St James’s Place (SJP), the wealth adviser. (“Banks accused of mis-selling risky investments to the elderly”, August 15). SJP denied wrongdoing and refused to offer compensation.

Edward and Celia Platts had a better result. Barclays eventually agreed to compensate the couple after they lost more than £100,000 in an investment fund recommended by the bank. The offer was made after Times Money covered Mr Platts’s protest outside his local Barclays branch in Diss, Norfolk (“The ten questions to ask before investing your hard-earned cash”, August 29).

The couple had banked with Barclays for 40 years and trusted it to give good advice. So when an adviser at the Diss branch recommended that they invest £300,000 — the entire proceeds from the sale of their house — in the Morley Global Balanced Income fund, they went ahead. That was in November 2007. By late last year the investment had halved in value.

Mr Platts, 60, made an official complaint to Barclays, but it was rejected in January. He then discovered that the paperwork filled out by the bank’s salesman was fraudulent, prompting Barclays to investigate further.

The documents claimed that the couple had £121,000 in cash savings, £5,500 in shares — neither of which was true — and even doubled the value of their cars. The couple are now considering whether to accept the bank’s offer and have also taken their case to the Financial Ombudsman Service. Barclays says that the investigation is still ongoing.

Battle over bills

Baffling bills are a hazard of modern life. Energy companies are particularly adept at issuing bills that are almost impossible to understand. However, some customers decided to fight back this year, with notable success.

Adam Laurie took on EDF Energy after it tried to charge him for an “underpayment” of £19,000 (“I have paid all my electricity bills, but EDF says I owe £19,000”, July 4).

Mr Laurie, who is renovating a house near Dorchester, Dorset, with his wife, was told to pay up even though EDF admitted that it had ignored its own meter readings and supplied incorrect bills for seven years.

However, Mr Laurie was not willing to give in that easily and pointed to the Energy Retail Association (ERA) code of practice for accurate bills. The code includes a pledge to protect consumers by limiting the backdating of incorrect bills to no more than one year.

EDF refused to accept his interpretation of the code, arguing that the wording requires only that energy companies supply regular bills, rather than accurate ones. Because the company had sent him bills during all the seven years in question, it claimed that it had the right to claim back all of the money. Angered by its response, Mr Laurie took EDF to the Energy Ombudsman, which ruled in his favour.

The ERA has since started a review of the code of practice and plans to issue an overhauled version next year, including a consumer version for the general public.

Mr Laurie says: “EDF’s attitude was unbelievable and, fortunately, the ombudsman agreed with me. EDF has now knocked £12,000 off the bill. It still leaves me with about £6,000 to pay back as a result of EDF’s errors, but it was important to fight for the principle.”

Readers also took on npower, after we highlighted accusations of widespread overcharging. In its contracts npower promised customers that it would charge them no more than 4,572 units a year at its higher-rate tariff. However, customers alleged that between May 2007 and May last year the company broke this promise and charged many more units at the more expensive rate. Margaret Erskine, of Surbiton, southwest London, was one reader who successfully obtained a refund on her npower gas bills. The 79-year-old had £75 returned by the company. (“Revealed: Ofgem’s failure to tackle npower overcharging”, November 14).

Fighting fraud

When you discover that hundreds or even thousands of pounds have been taken from your bank account fraudulently, that is bad enough. But when your bank then refuses to pay compensation, blaming you for the fraud, it can be devastating.

This is the situation that scores of readers found themselves in over the past year, prompting them to fight to prove their innocence. This has sometimes required the sort of detecting skills that would not look out of place on a TV series such as The Bill.

Angela Millar, 28, had £1,720 taken from her Halifax account by fraudsters after she was shoulder-surfed in a bar in East London while paying for drinks. Her card was then stolen from inside her handbag (“Could your bank have saved you from becoming a victim of fraud?”, June 27).

Halifax refused to offer compensation, so Ms Millar went to Argos, where the fraudsters had spent £750, and managed to get hold of CCTV footage of the criminals using her card. When she gave the footage to the police, Halifax finally agreed to refund the lost money.

Other featured readers are still battling for compensation. Emma Woolf, 28, lost almost £10,000 after her Abbey business account was hijacked by fraudsters (“Disgusted consumers turn on ‘shoddy’ complaints watchdog”, November 21).

The bank refused to compensate Ms Woolf and she took her complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service. But after eight months of waiting for a ruling she has become frustrated with the ombudsman and has decided to take Abbey to court. Her solicitor has uncovered new evidence, which she claims proves her innocence once and for all. She says: “It is a shame that it has not been cleared up by now, but the battle continues.”

Victims of the crunch

For many people the financial turmoil of the past few years has not been as disastrous as first feared. The world’s financial system did not collapse, although it came close, the stock market has bounced back and low interest rates have made it easier to pay off mortgage debts.

However, some investors have taken a savage hit, including almost 10,000 savers who lost out when Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander Isle of Man (KSFIOM), the offshore bank, collapsed in October last year. Many victims were former customers of Derbyshire Offshore, a subsidiary of Derbyshire Building Society, which was bought by KSFIOM in 2007. Susan and Brian Soar, of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, put £200,000 into the Derbyshire’s Isle of Man branch, which they are now struggling to get back. When we spoke to them in September, Mrs Soar and her husband, had received only £20,000 in compensation from the Isle of Man Depositors’ Compensation Scheme (“The forgotten victims of the credit crunch”, September 26). Three months on and they are still out of pocket by £112,000.

Mrs Soar says: “We have received £100,000 from the Isle of Man compensation scheme [the scheme pays out up to £50,000 per account], but now we are reliant on getting the rest of our cash from the liquidation of the company. It is very slow progress. The liquidator has said it could be 2017 before we get our money.”

We also highlighted the plight of 1,600 savers who had about £120 million invested in Landsbanki Guernsey when the Channel Islands bank was placed into administration. They are a step closer to getting their money.

In September depositors had received about 55p in the pound from the administrators. Last week the joint administrators Rick Garrard and Lee Manning said that depositors will receive more of their savings back in the new year. This means that depositors will have received about 67p in the pound of their savings.

The administrators also said that savers may receive more of their money than previously expected — 85p to 91p in the pound. Earlier in the year the final repayment was expected to be in the range of 70p to 80p in the pound.

Troubleshooter helps readers to obtain £45,000 in refunds and compensation

It has been another busy year for Rebecca O’Connor, Times Money’s Troubleshooter, right, who received thousands of letters and e-mails from irate readers seeking help.

Over the past 12 months Troubleshooter has won refunds and compensation worth more than £45,000 on behalf of readers. Many were at the end of their tether after being ignored, put on hold or dismissed by companies that were unwilling to resolve even the simplest of problems. The biggest single payout was redress for a mortgage application fee, which was charged after the customer was fed the wrong information. Graham McDonald, of Oxford, received £17,000 in refunds and “goodwill” payments — a euphemism for compensation — from Cheltenham & Gloucester.

Most of the sums recovered for readers were much smaller, though also worth fighting for.

The companies that stand out for infuriating our readers over the past year include BT, the telecoms and broadband provider; Abbey, the Spanish-owned bank; and Barclays. PayPal, the online payment system, was another source of irritation, as money disappeared and goods that had been ordered failed to turn up.

As you would expect, the complaints that appeared in Troubleshooter’s mailbag were diverse, from disputed gym fees to unfair charges. However, some common causes kept reappearing, including disputes about credit files. Readers complained about being turned down for loans and mortgages because of missing or incorrect information on their files.

Delays in payments and bank transfers were another recurring gripe, with Aviva, the insurer formerly known as Norwich Union, coming in for special criticism. Troubleshooter reported that several readers had experienced delays on endowment payouts of tens of thousands of pounds. Poor handling of cases of fraud also appeared in the mailbag with worrying regularity.