Advice on dealing with DCA's needed please!

wee_wheels

Hi, I am hoping someone can give me some advice. I have a few credit card debts (A&L total £2,400 & RBS £1,100) which were taken out in 2006.
I'll start with the A&L one first. I received a few letters from different DCA's (Apex, Bryan Carter & Fredrickson International) all of which I ignored due to the volume of abuse they were giving me & the fact that I couldn't pay them anything, hoping they would go away, they did, for a while. Fast forward 1 year, I am in a better position to pay off my debts so this one comes back in the form of Link Financial. I agreed by telephone to pay them £30 a month which I have been doing since Jul 2009 (the balance is now £1,298) They sent me a letter last month telling me that as they were aware, my financial situation has changed (they said they had been notified by a UK credit reference agency) so they would like more money monthly now from me or else they will be taking further action to recover it.

Now I was annoyed at this because I have never missed a payment to them in the 2 years this has been going on. I have received texts & cheeky phone calls (the same day payment was due) telling me my payment that month hadn't gone through but when I argued back with them & said it had, they said just to ignore the text because their system hadn't updated.

Now first things, I never received a letter of assigment from them, I didn't think I needed to as I owed the money & was now in a position to start paying it back. Having read the sites, I now realise I should have asked for proof. Having read sites telling me how little these DCA's pay for the debt (I have paid them over £1,000 already) I guess I panicked & just wanted to start clearing the balance on the debt. So armed with knowledge I sent them a CCA request 3 days ago (recorded signed for) I have tried to read as much as I can about the what if's when I get this or not. I am awaiting something from them. I am not denying the debt but I put on my CCA request that my account was in dispute (I have sent a SAR to A&L to reclaim my charges & take this off the balance) & asked Link to stop taking payments until they send me the details I requested. Reading other forums, I know Link are not going to make this easy so it would be great to know what my next step would be.

Any advice as to what to do next please, would be very much appreciated.

Regards the RBS debt. This is from April 2006 & has now been handed over to AIC whom I also sent a CCA to 3 days ago, marking it Account in dispute/ I do not acknowledge any debt to you. Depending on what advice I get from someone knowledgeable on this forum, I will apply the same as steps as Link.

Was this the correct procedure to follow?