Debt letter advice needed

pmiller056

My mistake - the collection company is ControlAccount, not ControlCredit as stated in my first post. I was posting after a long day. I did put the correct address on the envelope... ControlAccount appear to be a legitimate business with records at Companies House and the address on the letter received matches the address on record.

I have used AOL UK email for a long time. It has been reasonably OK over the years with many corporate take-overs on the way (Currently AOL/Yahoo/Verizon, but changing again soon). Sending email from AOL to a new Gmail account is not reliable and may take one or two attempts at mailing each way for it to become reliable. Gmail appears to tailor some of its filtering to each account. Sending email from GMX to AOL is guaranteed to fail. According to error messages, AOL blocks everything coming from the IP addresses that GMX uses as spam. Sending from AOL to GMX is usually OK. My employer uses Microsoft Office 365 as a managed service for email - last time I spoke to our IT guys, over 80% of incoming email to our site never gets past the 'front door', What eventually appears in staff spam folders is stuff that could be spam, but could be legit. From experience, including the examples above, email is an unreliable form of communication and anything critical must be followed up with a phone call or where appropriate a letter to make sure the message is received at the other end.

pmiller056

Controlaccount have now sent a new letter demanding even more money. The recorded delivery letter I sent asking them to prove the debt by providing a copy of the allegedly unpaid invoice appears to have been ignored. Any suggestions?

Manxman_in_exile

It seems very odd to me that you have successfully contacted UPS, actually spoken to a living human being there, and they are telling you that they don't know about any debt that controlaccount are chasing you for.  Is that what you are saying?

When you spoke to UPS you gave them your full name and address as it appears on the letters from ControlAccount, you gave them the reference number and they still didn't know what debt you are being chased for?

If you honestly have no idea what this is about, I would write a formal letter to UPS, together with copies of the letters from ControlAccount, telling UPS to instruct their agent (ControlAccount) to stop harrassing you for a non-existent debt.  Explain further that you have already contacted UPS customer Services (or whoever) and that they have confirmed that you don't owe them any money.  Tell them you expect to receive confirmation from them that they have instructed ControlAccount to cease.  Also send a copy to ControlAccount.

If ControlAccount are just debt collectors they can't do much anyway.  You only need to start worrying if they - or UPS - send you a letter before action

MalMonroe

On 30 June, you said "The debt collection company has a UPS reference on it, but using this to search on the UPS website finds nothing. Phoning the UPS helpline was a waste of time - the lady on the end of the phone could not match the reference given to anything within UPS."

But phoning UPS was obviously NOT a waste of time because the person you spoke to could not match any of the information from Controlaccount to anything within UPS. Doesn't that tell you something?

To me it says that UPS have not instructed anyone to chase you and that you therefore have no debt with anyone.

I would do as Manxman suggests above and write a formal letter to UPS, recorded delivery - and send a copy of it to Controlaccount too.

It could be an honest mistake or it could be a scam. Either way, it doesn't seem as if you owe anyone anything. And it's annoying that you have to spend time and trouble sorting this out, which you could mention in your letter to Controlaccount and tell them that if they don't leave you alone, you'll be sending them an invoice for compensation for all the trouble they've caused. At the very least they should give you an apology!

And then you can always also complain to the Financial Ombudsman about the debt collection company, link here -

https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/consumers/complaints-can-help/credit-borrowing-money/debt-collecting

pmiller056

After the suggestion here, I phoned UPS on three different occasions at different times of day to get more information. Each time taking a slightly different route through their systems. On each occasion I did manage to speak to a human. Each time I called I was
transferred to another department and left in a music on hold black hole. Each time I gave up after about 15 minutes on hold. For preservation of my sanity I've given up trying to get anything useful out of UPS directly. Given the short timescales imposed by Controlaccount, I'd be surprised if any useful written correspondence could be acheived with UPS before collection activity by Controlaccount is escalated further.

The Controlaccount website is not helpful and provides minimal account detail beyond what is in the posted letter. I phoned them
and spoke to a reasonably helpful sounding person. I mentioned the recorded delivery letter I had sent asking for proof of debt and there was no acknowledgment that they had received it. I mentioned FCA guidleines about stopping collection activity when requested until the debt was proven. I was promptly told that they were not bound by FCA rules, because the type of financial  transaction involved is not an activity that is regulated by the FCA. The Financial Ombudsam service mentioned above will only get involved in disputes involving FCA regulated activities. The only industry affiliation that Controlaccount has is that they are a member of the Credit Services Association. The CSA appears to exist to serve their members interests and will not get involved in any consumer dispute with a memeber business.

I stated to the person on the phone at Controlaccount that no invoice or reminder had ever been received from UPS and that I wanted proof of the debt. The person agreed to get the relevant information from UPS and pass it on to me by email or post. I chose post. I was told that information would take 7-14 days to come from UPS and that collection activity would re-start 48 hours after the information was sent. I pointed out that this was unfair, because if the items were posted later on a Friday 2nd class, I'd be unlikely to get it before the following Wednesday. After a bit of pushing from me they agreed to suspend collection activity for 7 days after posting the proof information. I also pointed out that I had no way of knowing when items were to be posted and their imposed collection timetable before starting legal action and charging me even more money was very short. Because of the uncertain timing I was at risk of inadvertently having further action taken against me without prior warning, despite my efforts to engage with them. The person on the end of the phone suggested that it was best if I phoned back in a week to check on progress of getting information from UPS and if collection activity was still suspended or when it re-started. I'll phone back in a week.

Given that Controlaccount have already made a point of ignoring a recorded delivery letter, at present I have no faith that they will actually do what they said that they would do over the phone and continue collection activity regardless.

sheramber

UPS will have sold the debt to the collection agency so it will no longer be on their system as an unpaid debt.  

I don't know if  a SARS request to UPS would get the  information.

The debt agency buy an outstanding debt   at a reduced cost with the intention of pursuing that debt to recover the original amount- their profit.

They will not know anything about what the debt is for.

born_again

>>>Controlaccount plc does not have access to amend your credit file with any credit reference agency. The only time your credit file will be affected is if legalproceedings are required to recover outstanding amounts at which time a County Court Judgement may be lodged against you. They will update your credit fileaccordingly to reflect whether the debt is outstanding or cleared. Information relating to debt stays on your credit file for 6 years from the date of the originaldefault with the creditor. Your credit file will be used by lenders when making future lending decisions.<<<

There is a hell of a lot of errors in that paragraph for a company that does what they do...

Ectophile

sheramber said:

UPS will have sold the debt to the collection agency so it will no longer be on their system as an unpaid debt.  

I don't know if  a SARS request to UPS would get the  information.

The debt agency buy an outstanding debt   at a reduced cost with the intention of pursuing that debt to recover the original amount- their profit.

They will not know anything about what the debt is for.

But they haven't got much chance winning, if it ever goes to court, if they can't even say what the debt is for.

sheramber

True, but they hope their scare tactics will make the person pay up without going to court. They may not even turn up at court.

user1977

Many of these debts have no hope of being enforced at court anyway, because of a lack of necessary information, being out of time, etc. They're bought at a discount and the agencies take their luck at seeing what they can extract out of the debtors by churning out the letters.