Lowells - Newbie needs some help please

mousehunt

Hello I would be grateful for some help - sorry this is a little long winded but I have provided all of the background information first.

My husband had 2 Capital One cards one issued in 2000 and one issued in 2003 one was a visa one was a mastercard.

The visa one issued in 2000 had a balance of £1295 and the mastercard one issued in 2003 had a balance of £373 my husband had paid the credit protection insurance for the entire lives of both cards. In 2006 my husband was made redundant. He tried to claim from the insurance but was unable to. We wrote several letters asking for them to credit thier unusable insurance to both cards and we would quite happily carry on paying the much smaller outstanding balances. Letters went backwards and forwards and then stopped. In the meantime we moved house - we did write to Capital One giving them our new address. We had a re-direction on our post for 3 months - but received no further correspondence from Capital One. My husband was not paying them anything as we were concentrating on out priority debts being paid.

Over the last 2 years my husband settled his other debts his credit improved he was able to get a contract mobile phone, and contract broadband. Things were improving. Despite that I was made redundant in 2007.

In March of this year my husband received a letter from Lowell advising of doorstep collections for the outstanding debts to Capital One. To avoid any further problems I (stupidly after reading the forums) replied in writing to Lowells and sent 2 payments one for £25.00 and 1 of £10.00 with a covering letter which I signed on my husbands behalf. We received a letter back advising they would discuss with thier client if these payments were satisfactory, and they would come back to him. They did not reply - I made no further payments to them.

At the end of last week we received a Pre Litigation letter stating that we had not kept to the arrangement - which they had not confirmed was satisfactory.

Yesterday my husband received a copy of his credit file showing that in March 2008 Lowells had added the 2 debts for Capital One - showing that they were the lenders - no mention of Capital One. They have a D showing in all the months until September. They did not show that a payment had been made to each in March. They have now also locked them for September and October.

My questions are the following:-

Can Lowells add these debts to my husbands credit file?

If they cannot how do we go about getting them corrected?

As my husbands did not acknowledge the debts to Lowell it was me - can he write the non acknowledgement of the debt letter?

How should we go about getting the debt cleared if he cannot use the non acknowledgement letter- do we pay Lowell?

Sorry this is so longwinded - I hope someone can help please

Many thanks

GeorgeUK

Right, there seems to be a few things that you need to do here.

You should write to Cap1 requesting repayment of all the PPI payments made as they did not pay out - there is a section to see if the PPI was missold here. Did they ever state why they would not pay out on the insurance? If you haven't already done so, i would claim back all charges that they made against you (in same section)

Your husband had 2 cards - were these soley in his name or joint accounts?
If they were in his name, then any payments someone else made to the account should come off the balance total but should not be deemed as an acknowledgement of the debt by your husband.

It sounds as if these debts are not yet statute barred, but they will be 6 years (5 in Scotland) after the last payment was made to the account or written acknowledgement that the debt was owed (by the account holder).

I would send a customer credit agreement (CCA) request to the collection agency for now (one for each account). If they are unable to provide a copy of the credit agreement within 12 working days, then the debt is unenforcable.

It may be better to ask for this thread to be moved to the debt free wannabe board - there is alot more detail on CCA's over there and you may get more input from there.

mousehunt

Thank you for you help - I could not work out how to get the post moved so I started a new thread on the debt free wanabee thread. I hope I have not messed anything up.
I will start the process you advised in your thread - if only I had found this site earlier.