Advice on claiming money from company due to wrongfully placed cat 6 fraud marker.

Oscar99

This is quite long TL;DR at the bottom.

Just over a year ago now, EE placed a cat 6 fraud marker on my credit file, citing "Misuse of facility" as the reason. I have been back and forth with their (honestly terrible) customer service for about 9 months now as it took me 3 months to actually figure out what was going on. I finished speaking to them about an hour ago and after filing two complaints, being told I would be contacted 4 times and never being contacted at all and waiting for several months they have agreed that the case is in-fact not fraud and they will remove the marker some time in the next 30 days. What surprised me though is that the bloke on the phone said that the fraud marker had already been removed from my EE account although nobody seems to have attempted to remove it from my credit file despite the "case not being fraud" their own words. And me explicitly stating every time I rang that I want this fraud maker removing from my credit file.

So, after finally managing to get the fraud marker removed from my file, I need to get my life back on track after they have destroyed it, burned it and buried the ashes for a year.

Problem is I don't have the money to do that as they have removed my ability to access financial services for over a year and I have been unable to travel to get work as no insurance company wanted anything to do with me and I live in an area where there is no public transport at all.

So that's the situation I am in. I have a company that has admitted that they have affected my life through actions that they shouldn't have taken and I now need to get money out of them to sort it out. However, I've got no idea how to go about this. I've made it clear over the phone that even though the fraud marker is being removed, I am still not happy with the situation and that I will be expecting more from them. (After they had the cheek to ask if I had any intention of paying £900 in fees on the account they closed!!!)

So where do I begin? Any advice on here would be appreciated or if any of you can refer me to services that can offer me advice on how to go about this that would be just as good.

TL;DR
Company ruined my ability to earn, travel and access financial services for a year with a fraud marker on a case that they just agreed wasn't fraud and have agreed to remove. I need to get money from them to sort my life out. How to go about this? (Preferably without having to go to court)

sourcrates

Hi,

Firstly, you need to exhaust EE`s complaints procedure.

There is no automatic right to credit, so your dispute is the wrongful application of a fraud marker on your credit file, although the circumstances and effects surrounding this will be looked at.

If you are unhappy with the response from EE, you can then escalate the matter to the ombudsman services, the process is explained here :

https://www.ombudsman-services.org/sectors/communications

Your only other option is to start a private prosecution.

Oscar99

I'm pretty familiar with EE's complaints procedure by now as I've been through it fully about twice but only in regards to the fraud marker. So I need to bring the matter up with them through a complaint, if I am unhappy with the response I can them ask them to re-consider and speak to a team leader/line manager. Then if that response isn't sufficient I can ask to be escalated to the complaints team.

If I'm not happy with what I get from them I can then ask that they refer the case to the citizens advice bureau. Then finally, if nothing comes of that I can request a deadlock letter and take it to the ombudsman service. And if nothing comes of that then..... I guess I'll be talking to the family solicitor.

Guess I'm not quite done with endless phone menus and waiting for responses that will never arrive then.

molerat

If claiming compensation you need to be clear about the level you see as reasonable, you need to figure out your actual loss.

[Deleted User]

What is it you’re after exactly?

Has the fraud marker been removed now?

Oscar99

I finished the call with them about 12 PM today. The rep stated that the fraud marker could take up to 30 days to be removed so in 30 days I'll have to send another DSAR to Cifas to find out. I haven't got my hopes up to be honest as they haven't proven themselves to be very reliable at all.

What I'm after if enough money mainly for the re-acquisition of transport so I actually stand a chance of getting a job. At the start of this mess I only had about a month left on my insurance and was looking for jobs. When my insurance ran out I had enough money for the first couple months but due to the fraud marker, nobody was interested, they all wanted full payment up-front or basically told they weren't interested in dealing with me. Eventually I just had to end up selling the bike to get some money in. I live in the middle of nowhere, there's no public transport and the nearest town is 18 miles away.

This is why I need to squeeze them for what I see as their wrongful actions.

Oscar99

Exactly why I told them that I would be contacting them at a later date and is something I'd have to speak to somebody who knows what they're doing in regards to this.

The loss of transport as I've said above is the main thing I'm looking for but people have been talking about claiming for potential lost wages and the distress and inconvenience the whole fiasco has caused.

At the time the marker was placed on my file I was searching for jobs will the full intention of getting one although there's no guarantee I would have got one so I'm not hopeful about that side of things if I choose to go with it. As for the inconvenience side I quite frankly have no idea how that is calculated.

I'm not going to come out in a better position because of this situation, however, the least I can do is try to minimise the damage caused by it and hope that EE will accept that their actions have caused this loss to me and agree to help me get back to some sort of normality.

[Deleted User]

If you’re thinking of a figure in the thousands then that’s a no-no.

Question - if you work then where’s your savings? Emergency fund? You could have gotten a bike or run-around for cheap.

I doubt absolutely every insurance company turned your down for a policy with them.

fwor

Realistically, all you can expect is a goodwill payment. It is very very unlikely that they will make any payment that could in any way be described as compensation, and I doubt that they will recompense for what you would consider to be consequential losses.

I can't recall the exact details from your previous thread, but I think you would have to concede that the way that you paid for the EE service originally (service taken out in one name but paid for in another?) gave reason for them to be suspicious, and then the inability to get in touch with you for an explanation could have reinforced those suspicions.

You have to bear in mind that at least some of the contributing factors in the case were down to your family's choice to move house, and were not caused by EE at all.

Oscar99

In this country we have freedom of movement, people can go where they please. In regards to the in-ability to contact me. They had a mobile number a backup number and an e-mail address that they could have used all of which they confirmed that they had when asking for details to contact me after placing each complaint.. It's not like I just vanished never to be seen. The address was never updated on the account due to the fact that EE had put us under the impression that the account had been closed when in-fact they had kept it open.

In regards to the payment method, this is something that rep at EE had suggested when the account was being set-up. At the time my mother was attempting to open the account ,however, we suspect that due to the moving situation she was unable to pass the credit check. This is when the rep suggested that somebody else in the household could open the account with her as a third party so they would be able to take the payments. There should be nothing suspicious about a two people, with the same surname, both of which have been spoken to over the phone, opening a joint account. I must remind you that this is what an EE rep had suggested.

Oscar99

Please stay on topic but I will answer this one time. When have you ever heard of an 18 year old that just recently finished collage having significant savings or an emergency fund? Cheap runarounds are out of the question. I do not feel like purchasing a terrible car with 12 months dodgy MOT and then driving it around with no tax, insurance or licence. The notion that you would suggest doing that is insane.