Any ideas??

Secretdebts

As you can see by my signature I owe in the region of £800 on a Barclays account. I've just been wondering whether there is anything I can do to appeal against this debt. The circumstances are that is was a business account that I opened to be a sole trader. It was a basic account with no overdraft, a visa debit card with no cheque guarentee card etc. - As there were no facilities for going overdrawn I pretty much ignored this account - as I did with most of my debts to be honest . So my question is - if it was a basic bank account - why did they continue paying out direct debits (that I had forgotton about) and let the account get tonearly £800 overdrawn before bouncing these DDs and is there anything I can do to challenge this debt?

Tixy

Did they let the account go £800 overdrawn before the terminated the account? or is a lot of it charges/unpaid DD fees etc? have you had a breakdown of the debt to see how much were charges and how much were payments out? were they all DDs? were any continuos payment authority or similar instead?
As it was a business account what did the T&Cs says about going overdrawn/having insufficent funds?

If the balance owed is correct then I think there will be little you can do to challenge that this amount of money is owed.

Secretdebts

Hi. Thanks for replying. They've only just (last month) started rejecting the direct debits. From what I can see there are only overdraft charges of approx £20 per month- so that only accounts for approx £120 of the debt. - The direct debits were for a mobile phone and a mobile internet connection (dongle) - and were about £60 per month. I've had no returned DD fees as when the first ones bounced - the suppliers contacted me (this was the first I realised that they had not been moved over to my current account with the rest of the DDs). I just don't understand how a basic bank account that I was told it wouldn't be possible to go overdrawn on is now £800 overdrawn.

Tixy

It is a lot - I can only think it might be because it was a business account not a personal basic account.

I guess you could probably try to see if you can get some of the charges removed - were they writing to you after the first month of charges/going overdrawn?, but if the majority actually did pay off contracts then thats money the bank actually did pay out so can't imagine that they be willing to negotiate on thst part of the debt at all.