The Financial Reclaims Co

Roz_Richmond

Your possible sticking point is the fact that you withdrew their services after they had already submitted the complaint. At least, that's how I have viewed your comments on this thread. Can you clarify if that was the case?

Hi, I am now back from holiday and have had another letter from the Reclaims Co asking for the money.

I also wrote to the Insurance company at the end of last week with the following letter:

I am sorry that I have to write to you regarding events after I have been compensated.

My husband and I originally agreed for The Financial Reclaims Company to submit a complaint to you regarding the above policy. A copy of the letter of authority was sent to you by them in January 2006.

I received a letter from you on 10 January 2006 confirming that you had received a copy of the letter of authority from the Reclaims Co, which you could not accept. Enclosed was a new letter of authority for my husband and I to sign if we wished you to deal with the Financial Reclaims Co.

My financial adviser advised us not to use the Financial Reclaims Co due to the extortionate charges, so therefore we did not sign this letter, we just completed the questionnaire sent by you and returned it.

You consequently agreed that we should be compensated and we received an offer dated 15th February 2006. We accepted and received the money later that month or early March.

To my surprise I received a letter on 19th June from the Reclaims Co stating that they were pleased to have been able to secure compensation for us and was invoicing us for a 25% fee including VAT totalling £1,963.30.

I rang you and spoke to a consumer relations person and asked how the Reclaims Co found out that we were compensated. He said that the Reclaims Co had submitted the original letter of authority in April 2006 and that you had given them the compensation details.

I questioned why the details were given seeing that I had not signed a new letter of authority, which I understood would ensure that you were dealing with us directly. The consumer relations person told me that I should have rang them and told them that I wasn’t using the Reclaims Co. I do not believe that this is the case, as it stated in your letter that we were required to sign the new letter of authority if we wanted you to continue dealing with the Reclaims Co. Therefore, under the data protection act you were not authorised to divulge any information to the Financial Reclaims Co.

I feel disappointed that you accepted the original letter of authority that was submitted by the Financial Reclaims Co in April 2006 after the compensation had been settled and that obviously our records were not checked prior to divulging personal details to the Financial Reclaims Co. If our records had been checked you would have seen that my husband and I had not agreed to you dealing with the Financial Reclaims Co and that we had submitted the mortgage endowment questionnaire ourselves.

The Financial Reclaims Co was informed by my husband on 12th January 2006 that we were pulling out so why did they submit the original letter of authority in April 2006?

Once again I am sorry to have to write and complain as we were more than happy with the way you dealt with our complaint. All the money that we received from you has gone to pay off some of the mortgage and now I’m facing having to find £2,000 to pay to the Financial Reclaims Co for submitting a copy of a letter of authority which you did not accept. I hope you can understand how I feel!

End of Letter.

I am hoping to get some sort of reply this week as I need to reply to the Financial Reclaims Co within 7 days. I will be writing to them explaining the chain of events and am wondering whether I should offer them £500 for their trouble or should I stick to my guns and let them take me to court and see if I win. My financial adviser seems to think that I have a reasonable case. What do you all think?

Roz.

homer_j_3

Have you supplied the claims co the copy of the letter that you have stating that they needed correct authority?

If so great, if not supply them with a copy and in your letter state that you want an explanation on how the authority had become correct when you did not return anything further. Until this point is answered in full, you are not prepared to consider the possibility of paying the amount that they are requesting.

That should put the ball back in their court for a few days and see what comes back from both mortgage co and claim co.

Roz_Richmond

This is the next step. I will be writing to the Claims Co this week with the full chain of events and a copy of the letter from the Insurance Co stating that they could not accept the copy of the letter of authority that they had submitted.

Will keep you informed.

dunstonh

Thanks for the updates.

Personally, i think the insurance company will say its an issue between you and the claims company. That would reflect other cases I have been made aware of where people dispute paying the claims company. Although yours doesnt match exactly any of the ones I know.