o2 demolished my credit rating !!!

Sulkyjim

Long and dull story ... i will try to be concise! We were looking to re-negotiate our mortgage and I was horrified to be told "no" and that i "might want to check my credit rating".

I left 02 9 months ago and everything was fine. However... they have registered a debt of £100 as being in default for all this time. At no point did they contact me to tell me that they imagined I owed them a thing !!! No calls, letters or email at all.

I rang them and shouted and they acknowledged no record of attempting to contact me and agreed to credit my account. (I got a text the next day saying I was now £20 in credit???!)! I have written to them a week ago (recorded delivery) demanding that they contact experian and correct their mistake ... but checking it today ... a week after the text informing me that I was now in credit - they registered another month of default !

What do I have to do to get them to stop destroying my credit rating and quite frankly (and I hate those vulture "no win no fee" types as much as the next man but) ... should I sue them for damages? (we could not get the mortgage deal we would have wanted and I am now a tenant in my own home and have no rights to the property whatsoever!!!

Any advice much appreciated !

Badunkadunk

Have you got a Credit Report Reference from Experian? If so, email

consumer.helpservice@uk.experian.com

(making sure you CC yourself in) quoting the ref number and explaining that O2 have mistakenly registered a debt they acknowledge is erroneous.

As for compensation, I'm afraid this is highly unlikely. It's their world, we just work in it.

Sulkyjim

Thanks Badunadunk.... I will try mailing them! I did ring them (bit old school I am afraid !!!) and the helpful bloke I spoke to said that o2 would have to be the ones to do it !(?)

Other than the text announcing their sudden credit (a weird overpayment making a long-dead account 20 odd £ in credit) and any notes their customer service staff may (or may not!!!) have taken, I have no evidence to show experian!

Annoyingly, experian didn't inform me of the changes to my credit score either ... Which I thought was the whole point of my giving them money every month ?

Sadly, I think you are probably correct about the chance of succesfully demanding they cover my losses, borne solely as a result of their negligence, is slim to nil !!!

Badunkadunk

To be honest I thought it was up to the submitter (ie O2) to correct as well but Experian say not:

http://www.experian.co.uk/consumer/questions/askjames308.html

grumbler

This is just another (longer) way of doing this.

Buzby

What was their mistake? You owed them money, and when you realised this and paid them the marker stays in place. I'm not sure why you feel that them not contacting you is a reason for removal. It isn't. It simply reflects the status of your account, and it is this alone that must be accurate.

Silk

[QUOTE=Buzby;59659187]What was their mistake? You owed them money, and when you realised this and paid them the marker stays in place. I'm not sure why you feel that them not contacting you is a reason for removal. It isn't. It simply reflects the status of your account, and it is this alone that must be accurate.[/QUOTE]
It seems the account showing the £100 debt was not correct and has been corrected with an added £20 of credit applied

The OP doesn't say they paid anything to get this ????

mobilejunkie

The vultures won't touch this anyway. Sue and it will cost YOU unless you win (with costs). You'd need firm written evidence to support your claim. Suing would take months but since you can't claim for financial loss you'd also have to sue for the difficult area of them correcting your files - which may be difficult.

Assuming you get the credit reference agency/ies to correct their record(s) I would then ask O2 to BACS the £20 credit back to you as well.

It is O2 who need to expedite this with the credit reference agency(ies) and I'm not surprised it takes longer than a week. Keep on at them with a formal complaint.

Sulkyjim

Thanks all.

Buzby, as I said… I did not owe them anything (and as such paid them nothing) and at no time did they contact me to tell me that they believed I owed them anything! Their mistake was a) inventing a bill and b) not telling me that they had!

Experian describes the delinquent status of this debt as having “failed to keep your credit agreement and have not responded satisfactorily to requests to put your account in order.” They have not made any requests for me to put my account in order and if they had, I would have resolved it months ago and not had them trash my credit rating.

I have been financially penalised by not being able to get a favourable mortgage deal and as such, will continue to threaten them with legal action if they do not reverse the damage done. (also, having had to waive my rights to occupy the property, if the unthinkable happened to my other half, me and the kids would be out … and all thanks to o2 having failed to tell me that they had created a bill)! In any sane context, this would surely represent a case for me to demand they fix it immediately and perhaps compensate me for the time, stress and money lost.

Thus far I have; emailed the credit file referrals team directly at o2 (having tortured an email address out of a customer service representative), completed the query form on experian’s site (thanks for the link badunkadunk) and contacted a solicitor specialising in exactly these sort of issues.

Would love to sue them – but as Silk points out… I would probably require evidence. The innate problem here is that there is no evidence of any correspondence from them … so it’s a case of the rumsfeld-esque absence of evidence! I am probably reliant on them sorting it out and sabre-rattling can only do so much good!

If they continue to register the debt as showing, despite having credited me a month ago … what the hell can I do? Am I doomed to have this every month for the rest of my life and never be able to get credit again???!

paulsad

:mad:I hope you have better luck than I did with vodafone and their "fantastic" Web Relations Team ...

oopsadaisydoddle

Did they explain where this so called bill came from?

I appreciate that you believe you didn't owe it (and I'm not disputing what you said) but they obviously believe you did owe it and the fact that they've credited the account doesn't mean the bill wasn't due. They may have just wiped it as a goodwill offer.

As i said, I am not 'accusing' you of owing it, just trying to understand. Was it a system error that caused this extra bill? Discrepancy in disconnection dates?

If we can know that, then it may be easier to answer.