Debt collector is "missing" some payments from me

greensalad

I have paid off a debt collector recently. On my final payment, I sent them a cheque for the final amount and also a letter including all payments made and their respective dates. Some were made by cheque and some made by BACS.

They have now written back to me claiming that they only have 3 of the 6 payments. They are asking me to provide proof.

I've contacted my bank who can provide proof of the cheque but they want £10 per cheque. I feel this is now really unfair of the debt collection to ask me to provide proof. Especially if it costs me another £30 just to prove it to them!

What can I do? Can I send a letter to the debt collection agency saying it is their responsibility to provide proof that I owe them money? Or perhaps I should ask them to pay the £30 fee! Like that would work...

McKneff

Send them a bank statement with all important info blocked out.


Highlight the payments from you to them.


Or


Look at your cheque numbers, check that they have cleared through your bank and just send them the chqe numbers telling them that.

sourcrates

Agree with above post, just send a copy of a bank statement showing the relevant payments, you can access statements from your online account, assuming you have an online account, if not you will have to order copies from your bank, but again, they will charge for this.

greensalad

The problem is my bank statement doesn't show anything other than:

2 Feb 2015 CHQ 000006 - 116.00

I'm serious. It doesn't show any information that would actually be useful to prove I paid the cheque out.

I can show that cheque #06 was written on the chequebook stub as the debt collection agency, but that doesn't really prove anything.

MoneyMission2015

If you have the date that the cheque was taken from your bank account ask the debt collection agency to check their bank statements now to see if the cheques have cleared in their own account. It could be that they received the cheques but for some reason did not know which account it belonged to, so the money is sitting in a suspense account. We sometimes have this problem where I work because people will make a BACS payment in to our account but will not give any reference so we are unable to match the payment until we're made aware that they made the payment on a particular date. We are usually able to match it up then, based on them giving us the correct date & amount.


If the debt collection agency comes back again & says they did not receive the payment and your bank is saying the cheques have cleared from your account, then you will have to ask the bank to investigate on the basis that the DCA are saying they did not bank the cheque.

greensalad

MoneyMission2015 wrote: »

If you have the date that the cheque was taken from your bank account ask the debt collection agency to check their bank statements now to see if the cheques have cleared in their own account. It could be that they received the cheques but for some reason did not know which account it belonged to, so the money is sitting in a suspense account. We sometimes have this problem where I work because people will make a BACS payment in to our account but will not give any reference so we are unable to match the payment until we're made aware that they made the payment on a particular date. We are usually able to match it up then, based on them giving us the correct date & amount.


If the debt collection agency comes back again & says they did not receive the payment and your bank is saying the cheques have cleared from your account, then you will have to ask the bank to investigate on the basis that the DCA are saying they did not bank the cheque.

Unfortunately I've already given them the exact date of every payment. I laid it out in a table for them showing how much was paid and on what date, and in what form (some were BACS and some were cheques) so they had a record.

Of course they just wrote back saying "here are three payments we've received. You owe us x". No mention of "we can't find these payments" or whatever.

Also I've just realised one of the missing payments was made to the original company who I owed, I've specified that it was paid direct to the company. They haven't acknowledged that either and if I have to pay to get a cheque receipt to prove I paid them... I feel like the debt collection agency should have a responsibility to speak to their client to discuss whether a payment has been made. Not happy.

The bank investigation thing is a good idea though.