I am very confident I never took PPI - should I still claim?

Nasqueron

Yellabowley wrote: »

Am I the only person finding this whole thing quite bizarre. It appears that people on here are trying to convince people not to question whether they ever had PPI.

Not at all, we are simply stating it is a myth that PPI is "hidden in interest" (a common claims company story) thus you could have PPI and not know about it.

As an example, if you have a credit card with PPI, let's say you spend £500 and pay the minimum of £5. You would thus be debited £5 if you had no PPI.

PPI was commonly charged around 70p per £100 of balance left over (so approx 70p x 5 for £500 balance) so you would have paid £5 + £3.50 PPI = £8.50). Your statement would say £5 minimum payment and a second line £3.50 PPI.

If you knew you were going to pay £5 and were billed £8.50 any normal person would ring the bank and ask what this second line was.

Yellabowley wrote: »

If you know that you never needed it and always refused to take out cover when asked then it is definitely worth claiming.

Logically if you know you never took it out, what would your issue be? Remember it is not claim but complaint - you are putting in a formal complaint that the bank is guilty of wrongdoing by fraudulently applying a charge to your account against your will - you would put in a complaint the first CC statement you got showing you paid PPI when you refused it.

Yellabowley wrote: »

My mother has been a teacher all of her working life. With no prospect of being made redundant and very good sick benefits she never needed PPI. I actually remember her getting very annoyed with a salesman on the phone 14 years ago (it is possible to remember conversations from such a long time ago) and saying, "Are you telling me that if I don't take out the insurance you won't give me the loan?" and refusing to take it. I've just about convinced her to put a claim in.

Again, you are putting in a COMPLAINT, not a claim. If you are complaining that you were mis-sold a product that you may not even have had, it damages the creditability of any complaint (and you are lucky the banks are not pursuing people for putting in false complaints - given the number of PPI complaints from people with very good memories of events which actually never happened) - establish the facts first such as looking at the agreement or ringing the bank to see if they have any records - putting in a complaint detailing how she refused to have PPI on the loan and it was added without her knowledge when she may not have actually had it is a recipe for problems.

While teachers are given supreme protection (just look at the handful fired over the years even with schools failing and year after year of students not achieving the 5 A-C GCSEs) they are not immune to redundancy - the people in the civil service since 2008 who thought they were immune to redundancy had a shock awakening

Yellabowley wrote: »

While we have established that the PPI cannot be hidden in the interest it could still have been hard to spot. How many people pay much attention to yearly loan statements other than the 'Amount left to pay' box. You set up the loan, you know when it ends and you know what your monthly payment is. As long as that goes out every month who would question it? Does anyone get their calculators out and work out what the payments should be at the interest rate they were given? Maybe some do but the majority put their trust in the banks to work it all out.

It would be detailed on the loan agreement before you signed it, you know how much the loan is, so why would you sign off accepting a loan with extra amounts on?

Yellabowley wrote: »

Obviously if you knowingly took PPI out because you needed it then to make a claim is fraud. But the existence of people who have claimed thousands, despite being confident they didn't have it, is enough to make me believe that it's worth claiming. I don't have an answer as to how the banks fooled so many people, but the very existence of 'Auto-Payouts' showed that they know that their practices at the time were immoral if not illegal and that any court case is likely to find in favour of the claimant.

The answer is that people simply forgot or are telling porkies.

The "auto-payouts" are to get rid of the backlog or to avoid the £850 FOS fee which they are charged in every case.

Correlation is not causation.

Insider101

Yellabowley wrote: »

Obviously if you knowingly took PPI out because you needed it then to make a claim is fraud. But the existence of people who have claimed thousands, despite being confident they didn't have it, is enough to make me believe that it's worth claiming. I don't have an answer as to how the banks fooled so many people, but the very existence of 'Auto-Payouts' showed that they know that their practices at the time were immoral if not illegal and that any court case is likely to find in favour of the claimant.

The existence of auto payouts shows two things. 1) that the banks are snowed under with complaints and a lot don't have the capacity to investigate all of them. 2) That investigating complaints costs money (staff costs, admin, potential FOS fees) and where the amount involved is only a few hundred pounds it's cheaper just to pay out, regardless of the actual merits of the complaint. If a complainant goes to FOS, that alone costs £900 case fee!!

Very very few people would ever win a court case relating to sale of PPI. Courts judge on law, not their own view of fairness and the burden of proof is with the claimant to prove a breach of law. There's a good reason why very few PPI cases ever go to court when compared with the thousands that go through the complaints process every week.

The thing nowadays is that there are so many people who took out PPI willingly, but with a gap of 10-15-20 years have forgotten doing so. And many of them simply hear the newspaper/radio adverts claiming that it was added without people's knowledge then convince themselves that they didn't need it and would have never taken it. I've seen people argue that they would have got statutory sick pay (about £100 per week) if off sick and so would never have needed PPI. Or that they could have gone cap in hand to their parents/granny/aunt Vera who would have paid off their loan (you're a grown adult, have a bit of respect for yourself!)

Obviously there are substantial cases of genuine misselling and still a substantial number coming in. But there are also a substantial number jumping on the bandwagon. Making a complaint is a serious act, you are accusing someone of misconduct. It used to be that a complaint was an indicator of serious dissatisfaction. However, these days the act seems to have been cheapened to the point that people are doing it simply because "everyone else is trying it so why can't I".

thorsoak

We always made a point of refusing ppi on any loan that we took out - but the more I read about Black Horse made me wonder whether it had been hidden in the loan I took out on the purchase of a car in 2000. So eventually by going back through old bank statements, I found the loan account number and wrote to Black Horse, asking if ppi had formed part of the finance.

No response from them for 18 months - I'd forgotten about it when, out of the blue I received a very nice cheque from them for the ppi plus interest - and I would swear that it must almost have equalled the amount that I paid for the car!

So it might be worth checking ........

Brokerwise

thorsoak wrote: »

We always made a point of refusing ppi on any loan that we took out - but the more I read about Black Horse made me wonder whether it had been hidden in the loan I took out on the purchase of a car in 2000. So eventually by going back through old bank statements, I found the loan account number and wrote to Black Horse, asking if ppi had formed part of the finance.

No response from them for 18 months - I'd forgotten about it when, out of the blue I received a very nice cheque from them for the ppi plus interest - and I would swear that it must almost have equalled the amount that I paid for the car!

So it might be worth checking ........

Utter nonsense - your failure to notice it on your bank statement is not proof of it being hidden

thorsoak

Brokerwise wrote: »

Utter nonsense - your failure to notice it on your bank statement is not proof of it being hidden

What a crass statement: ppi would not be shown as separate to a loan repayment on a bank statement - had you read my post correctly, all I recovered from the bank statement was the loan account number - this loan was taken out in 2000 (via car dealership) and repaid by 2002.

You are correct in that I failed to spot the ppi loaded into the loan via the car dealership - that I accept. Had it been pointed out as an "optional extra" then it would have been rejected.

Please read posts before commenting.

McKneff

It shouldn't need to be pointed out as an optional extra, it was there as an optional extra, you just didn't read your paper work thoroughly.


So your remarks originally were 'utter nonsense'


It wasn't hidden, it was there......

roonaldo

Its remarkable how something written in black and white is 'hidden'.

magpiecottage

roonaldo wrote: »

Its remarkable how something written in black and white is 'hidden'.

It's remarkable that Black Horse as the lender has paid out in respect of an insurance policy sold by somebody else at a time when such insurance was not regulated.

Brokerwise

thorsoak wrote: »

What a crass statement: ppi would not be shown as separate to a loan repayment on a bank statement - had you read my post correctly, all I recovered from the bank statement was the loan account number - this loan was taken out in 2000 (via car dealership) and repaid by 2002.

You are correct in that I failed to spot the ppi loaded into the loan via the car dealership - that I accept. Had it been pointed out as an "optional extra" then it would have been rejected.

Please read posts before commenting.

I did, please understand what you are typing before making accusations

Yellabowley

While it might have been there in black and white, it appears that in many cases it was NOT clear to see.

As the person above has stated he didn't want or ask for it, yet when the account details were given to Lloyds they refunded the money he had paid out for PPI.

It's fine all the people on here taking the moral high ground and stating quite categorically that they always read all small print and always double checked figures for everything. Unfortunately not everyone has the time or even the financial understanding to do this. Those people relied on the banks to simply do what they said they would. And now several years later the paperwork is gone. The only way to check if they were conned is to complain and ask the banks to look into it. The worst the banks can say is that they've looked and can confirm that no PPI was taken out. If a system of auto payouts has been set up then that isn't the fault of the person making the complaint. No-one is asking for free money (ok some of the less scrupulous out there probably are) they just want to get back what they should never have been charged if anything.

There are so many examples like the guy above, that I stand by my opinion. It is definitely worth sticking a claim in if you know that you always turned the offer of PPI down.