Mortgage arrangement fees - claim and gain

badboybinks

Hi

I've just had a call from the company claim and gain saying that I am entitled to claim back all the interest that has been added to my mortgage for arrangement fees. Can't seem to find if this is true and now I am worried as the took my credit card details and said they will add £3200 onto my card and if I don't have a claim will refund it and if I do have a claim then theyi can pay it off with money I get. Anybody else heard of this.

Nasqueron

You need to immediately speak to your bank and block this transaction and get the card cancelled and a new one issued.

This is a scam known as "advance fee fraud" - they tempt you with big £££ and then get the cash off you, in a few weeks/months they will say nothing could be claimed and disappear, the company will go under with debts and set up as a new one in a few weeks to continue the scam leaving you with nothing.

Also report all the details to Action Fraud

Fingers crossed you can do a chargeback immediately

After this

STOP GIVING OUT CARD / BANK DETAILS TO COLD CALLERS

dunstonh

I am entitled to claim back all the interest that has been added to my mortgage for arrangement fees.

You are not. The adding of fees to the mortgage is allowed and is very common. Happens all the time and is quite normal and nothing wrong with it.

If you read the money advice service (an unbiased guidance provider put in place by Govt) at the following link and look at the text for arrangement fee you will see it says it can be added to mortgage
https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/mortgage-related-fees-and-costs-at-a-glance

Can't seem to find if this is true and now I am worried as the took my credit card details and said they will add £3200 onto my card and if I don't have a claim will refund it and if I do have a claim then theyi can pay it off with money I get. Anybody else heard of this.

Yes. it is known as advance fee fraud. You have been scammed. Advance fee fraud preys on greed and naivety. If you ever watched Hustle, you would know the format. Give the mark a reasonably plausible but totally wrong or fraudulent situation. i.e. telling you that you could get £xxxx in a refund. Whilst you are focused on that made up figure, your greed blinds you to the fact you have to pay a smaller amount to get it and you pay it willingly as your brain isnt working as greed has got the better of you.

You have been well and truly stitched up. Even if you added a typical mortgage fee of £250 to £500 and you ended up borrowing for 25 years, the total cost of £500 including interest on it would be about £1400. Yet you paid £3200. I bet they told you that you would get a much bigger amount. Most of these scams tend to say you get tens of thousands.

I suggest you contact your credit card company and tell them you have been scammed

JimmyTheWig

dunstonh wrote: »

You are not. The adding of fees to the mortgage is allowed and is very common. Happens all the time and is quite normal and nothing wrong with it.

But are they allowed to add interest to these fees?
I know that with Santander you can add the fees to the mortgage but they don't charge interest on it. So it's worth doing.
I'm guessing if they were allowed to charge interest on the fees then they would.

But the chances are the banks know this and so the chances are the OP is entitled to £0.

dunstonh

But are they allowed to add interest to these fees?

Yes. They are borrowing the money to pay the fee and when you borrow, you pay interest on it (just as the text on the MAS site says)

In most cases, the lender will add the fee to a sub account and the person is free to pay that sub account balance off at any time as there is no tie in with it (unlike the mortgage deal on the main amount being borrowed).

But the chances are the banks know this and so the chances are the OP is entitled to £0.

Compliance guidance issued to advisers is that we should add it as a risk warning. i.e. that adding the fee to the mortgage will mean you paying interest on the fee for however long you borrow the money. In many cases, people just dont have the savings to show they could pay the fee anyway. The person would have to show they had sufficient savings, above and beyond an emergency fund of 6-12 months expenditure, to have any hope of the complaint being taken seriously. The risk warnings would need to be missing and it would have to be an advised case after October 2004 (not a non-advised case. Most bank arranged mortgages were non-advised prior to the recent MMR)

JimmyTheWig

Thanks dunstonh.
Chances are, then, that the OP is due £0.