Written off loan problem!

boo_star

Bermonia wrote: »

The term IS commonly used by some of the major high street banks.

I've never heard it used in this context, including working in the debt management department of a high street bank.

fatbelly

Cabot will have purchased this for a fraction of the balance so will be open to a 'full and final settlement' deal.

sourcrates

The debt was not written off, whoever you spoke to misunderstood the screen in front of them, and gave you the wrong information.
Call handlers normally only follow a script, and rarely deviate from it, they are the bottom rung of the ladder, and are not privy to what happens higher up the chain of command, they only know what there screen tells them.

The debt was sold to Cabot, so on the original creditors systems, the debt will have shown just as a zero balance, so the call handlers have wrongly assumed the debt was written off, because no further details are usually given, or would have been available to them, when in fact it had been sold.

Possibly new staff, or maybe they had not been trained up sufficiently, either way mistakes happen, and the call handlers made a mistake, I suspect that they did not give you a reason why the debt was supposedly written off, which again backs up the error theory, and I recon that will be the outcome of your complaint as well.

Logically and commercially speaking, creditors do not write off 14 grand of debt for no good reason.

Joe0202

The information I have been given by 4 different employees is that on the 29th October 2018 a decision was made to write off the debt as bad debt it was deemed unrecoverable. This was also reflected on my credit file and this was marked as settled. I am awaiting the evidence Cabot have requested and will update everyone as to what happens. Even today after a follow up call to BOS/AA they still state this has been written off and I do not need to pay the loan back, once my refund is complete the account will be officially closed.

Ben8282

Can you tell us who actually instigated the call where you were initially informed that the loan had been written off? Did they just call you out of the blue to inform you of this or did you call them? If you called them, why? You could not have known in advance that they had written it off.
Why did you cancel the direct debit? If they had written off the loan and therefore required no further payments, then they would have stopped taking the direct debit. Why did they take 2 extra months payments which they are now going to refund?
How could the loan have been deemed unrecoverable when you were still making repayments? It looks as if you were on some sort of arrangement to pay when you say you were repaying a reduced amount but the account was not defaulted. It makes absolutely no sense that they would write off the loan at this point or sell it to debt collectors.
What well could have happened though is that your own actions in cancelling the direct debit changed an AP into a default at which point the account was passed to a debt collection agency. Something really does not add up here.

Forwandert

Does it still show as settled on your credit report?

Joe0202

I called them after seeing that they had marked my credit file as settled. They were being paid as part of a debt management plan through step change and advised me that they needed to be removed from this plan as the debt had been written off and I no longer needed to make payments to them. They had 2 extra months as I did not want to just cancel the payments as I could not believe it was just gone but after numerous calls each telling me to stop payments it’s been written off I did. It made no sense to me either but I could only act upon the information they were giving me and do as they were requesting. I would have continued to pay but they told me to stop and said the debt has been written off and I no longer needed to pay. This is all on the voice recordings as they record all calls for training and monitoring preposes. I can’t believe that if they are reading from a script that’s not what it said because they were all giving me the same information. 8 months of being debt free and apparently I now owe a debt collector the Money! Needless to say if this is the case I will be going to the financial ombudsman and wanting their original statements upheld.

boo_star

Ben8282 wrote: »

Can you tell us who actually instigated the call where you were initially informed that the loan had been written off? Did they just call you out of the blue to inform you of this or did you call them? If you called them, why? You could not have known in advance that they had written it off.
Why did you cancel the direct debit? If they had written off the loan and therefore required no further payments, then they would have stopped taking the direct debit. Why did they take 2 extra months payments which they are now going to refund?
How could the loan have been deemed unrecoverable when you were still making repayments? It looks as if you were on some sort of arrangement to pay when you say you were repaying a reduced amount but the account was not defaulted. It makes absolutely no sense that they would write off the loan at this point or sell it to debt collectors.
What well could have happened though is that your own actions in cancelling the direct debit changed an AP into a default at which point the account was passed to a debt collection agency. Something really does not add up here.

It's not uncommon for long-term APs to be sold off, especially if a company is ditching its loan book from an affinity brand.

fatbelly

Can I just point out that Cabot are not a debt collector, they are a debt buyer. I'd love to be proved wrong but I suspect there has been a legitimate transaction here.

sourcrates

Joe0202 wrote: »

I called them after seeing that they had marked my credit file as settled. They were being paid as part of a debt management plan through step change and advised me that they needed to be removed from this plan as the debt had been written off and I no longer needed to make payments to them.

They had 2 extra months as I did not want to just cancel the payments as I could not believe it was just gone but after numerous calls each telling me to stop payments it’s been written off I did. It made no sense to me either but I could only act upon the information they were giving me and do as they were requesting.

I would have continued to pay but they told me to stop and said the debt has been written off and I no longer needed to pay. This is all on the voice recordings as they record all calls for training and monitoring preposes. I can’t believe that if they are reading from a script that’s not what it said because they were all giving me the same information. 8 months of being debt free and apparently I now owe a debt collector the Money! Needless to say if this is the case I will be going to the financial ombudsman and wanting their original statements upheld.

The world of debt collection/sales is a pretty murky one, with very little regulation, it mostly operates using guidelines, which can be interpreted differently by different companies.

Let’s assume then what your creditor told you was correct, just because they deemed the debt to be unrecoverable, does not stop them from selling the account on, in your case to Cabot.

This is, unfortunately, the system we have to work with.

Did they ever put any of this into writing to you ?

I suspect not..........