For 10 years I’ve been harassed by letters from debt collecting agents claiming I owe money to companies I have had no dealings with. I even found a county court judgment (CCJ) had been issued against me without my knowledge.
It turns out I shared my maiden name with the person who does own the debt, although we have different middle names and live in different counties. I’ve repeatedly asked the debt collectors to remove me from their records.
I’ve involved a solicitor, and even reported it to the police but nothing works.
The latest letter insists I owe £146 to a telecoms company I’ve never been with.
My credit score has been affected and I was refused a mortgage. When will it end?
KS, Wolverhampton
The sense of stress and impotence caused by a threatening demand for a stranger’s debt is incalculable. Some of those you have received over the years threaten bailiff visits and legal action. When the CCJ was taken out in your name, fines were added to the sum you were said to owe.
You have now successfully applied for the CCJ to be set aside.
Your namesake, who was identified to you by one of the collection agents, in itself a GDPR breach, appears to owe money to payday lenders and a telecoms company, among others.
You have been contacted by more than half a dozen debt collection agents and their legal representatives over the years. Your log of communications with each of them shows the dizzying number of emails, letters and phone calls you’ve had to send or make. As soon as one company falls silent, another pops up.
One collector, which resumed its demands months after removing you from its records, concluded insultingly that the debtor must be an ex-partner of yours and told you to disassociate your accounts from them.
The core of the problem is the long chain of businesses involved in enforcing a debt. Big companies that can’t get a customer to pay up often sell the debt to a collection agency. The collection agency will typically use a debt tracing firm to locate the errant debtor. And debt tracing firms may subcontract to other companies.
The depressing truth is that anyone can set up as a debt tracing firm and there’s no official oversight of their methods and sources.
According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which regulates data protection, creditors must take “reasonable steps” to ensure that the information unearthed by a trace is accurate before contacting an individual. A matching name and birth date is not considered sufficient to link someone to a debt.
Anyone who is chased for an unrecognised debt should write to the collection agency requiring it to send evidence of money owed and to put the account on hold in the meantime.
If evidence is not supplied and the company continues to send demands, they can complain to the ICO, or, in the case of a financial company, to the Financial Ombudsman Service.
However, an upheld complaint will not necessarily stop other companies using the inaccurate link. I contacted the latest agency to pursue you, CRS Recovery, whose website promises “to do everything we can to help you get to a better place”.
A month after promising to leave you in peace, it resumed demands for an unpaid phone bill. I asked how it had found and verified your information, but no response came.
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