My £5.9k loan is now £17K after 18 years of paying and Elderbridge refuse to give me a breakdown

Marmers

Hi Anyone! I'm really praying someone can help as I'm at my wit's end after being given the absolute stonewall by a company over a loan I took out in 2003 for £5,900 over 15 years which is now somehow £17,000. Their frustrating actions and promises have just about beaten me after 2 years of trying to sort this out.

Worse is that the house has been waiting to be sold since last year and they know this and are now simply ignoring me and just waiting to take the £17,000 immediately - so I have stalled the house sale until I get some answers.

It's a complete nightmare and the company is called Elderbridge ltd who took over a load I took out originally with GE Money for over £5,000 in 2003 over a term of 15 years.

The loan was taken out with GE Money against the property in 2003 for approx £5,500.00 for improvements.

The loan as I say was over a term of 15 years which should have been settled in 2018.

I admittedly defaulted on some payments for a while in 2004-2007-ish but when it went to court, I repaid the whole amount of the default payments in one full payment (approx £2400.00) bringing the balance owed up to date completely and then I carried on paying the remainder of the loan without any issues as per the agreement to date.

The loan was subsequently taken over by this new company in 2012 - Elderbridge Ltd from Newport NP20 9NJ.

It is now 18 years later and the loan should have been paid off 3 years ago.

When I noticed these payments were still coming out of my account, I questioned the new company and they told me I now owe in excess of an outlandish figure today of £16,878.24

For the last 2 years, I have been trying to ascertain where on earth this amount has arisen from as even calculating the amount with the interest they are currently charging me - even on the amount of just under £17,000 it couldn't possibly amount to what it is today.

They simply refused to give me any information whatsoever, stonewalling me (which raised suspicions even more) at every single opportunity, and so my partner took over trying to get the information from them a year ago. I signed off and signed the agreements they sent out so that he could now communicate with them on my behalf. He provided them with his ID and they did indeed start to send information and a breakdown of the account, but only from 2012 when they took over the loan although they can still see the loan details from the beginning when it was with GE Money.

He has had 9 long calls with them which simply resulted in a string of empty promises from them to send out the breakdown from the beginning of the loan, all the charges, and payments they have on file. They never did and It was so frustrating and tiresome dealing with their empty promises, it was making me feel ill.

Their latest diversionary tactic to stall on sending out the details required pre-2012 is to now state that they now require proof of his ID again, even though when they requested this originally, he provided it. They were quite happy to send out some meaningless figures regards the account from 2012 that was in no way pertinent to the information or breakdown in the costs we required. Seems like it was okay when they would send out the wrong info but now they want him to jump through hoops just to get the actual information on the loan that would shed light on these unknown charges.

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The issue is when people are purposely hiding the most important information to such an extent as this it usually means they have something to hide which isn't in their best interests to hand over. If they had the information that shows where this huge amount has amassed from then they would have happily sent it over. They know that the figures are wrong and they are purposely hiding them. It is almost bordering on theft or fraud.

Being a financial company, they have to keep all phone records for at least 4 years. We have the dates and times we have phoned them and the complaints they have replied to stating that they have listened to certain phone calls when their loan advisors refused to talk to us or hung up. They actually awarded us £30.00 as a payment for the rudeness of their staff. This seemed almost like a bit of a joke compared to the real amount they are attempting to extort from me.

I have worked it out that they currently owe me in the region of £2500.00 - £3000.00 in overpayments, plus any interest above the bank base rate on this. 

My partner had an accountant friend take a quick look and they said that it looked like there has probably been a £10,000 'miscalculation' amount added onto the loan figure when it was passed over and sold on by GE Money to Elderbridge. We feel that it was Elederbridge that did this, as otherwise they would have gone back to GE Money and made inquiries regarding it unless there was a time limitation on which they could do this in which case they will be stuck with a loan that they paid for that was now £10,000 smaller than they had thought.

This £10,000 figure would have been about correct with the amount that was then owed on the loan in 2012, which would have been around £2,000, and would have been paid off at the loan repayments rate of £78.00 per month by 2015.

Our idea was to maybe take them to small claims court and request a judgment for the overpayment payment made by myself - thus forcing them to come to court and show ALL the necessary paperwork that we have been requesting over the last 2 years.

I just want the information on the breakdown of the charges on the entire loan from them which they have admitted they have to find out how and where this figure has come from. I do not want this money to be taken from the sale of my house and paid to them at all, If anything, I want it held in escrow until the matter has been settled in a court of law if necessary.

Any and all advice on how to proceed and what you can do to assist really, really would be most welcome.

The letters are signed by Richard Granville the servicing director but he is totally uncontactable - you cannot email them at all.

Any help would be very welcome! Thank you

TripleH

Might be worth doing a SAR request with them to find out what information they do hold on you. This might be a good starting point to see if there are any glaring errors?

sourcrates

Agree with the above, a SAR would be my first choice here to get the ball rolling.

You should be quite specific about the information you are requesting, the period from when this company took over your loan would be the starting point, there should be a letter template on the ICO website -

How do we recognise a subject access request (SAR)? | ICO

ManyWays

Send them a formal complaint in writing saying you want a breakdown of your account showing all credits and debits made going back to the start as you do not believe the balance is correct. Send the complaint to the Financial Ombudsman after 8 weeks if they have not replied.

You can also send a SAR, but do this separately to the complaint. 

bris

You say they want to take the money when the house is sold, this sounds to me like this has been to court and a charging order has been granted, yes, no? it's the only way they can force you to pay from a house sale.

This comes with statutory interest, the interest is mounting on this at 8% PA, add that to penalties and interest on missed payment it soon mounts up. Holding it in escrow is never going to happen, the legal procedure is you solicitor pays them direct, you have no say it, they get paid after the mortgage provider who has first charge.

kaMelo

bris said:

You say they want to take the money when the house is sold, this sounds to me like this has been to court and a charging order has been granted, yes, no? it's the only way they can force you to pay from a house sale.

This comes with statutory interest, the interest is mounting on this at 8% PA, add that to penalties and interest on missed payment it soon mounts up. Holding it in escrow is never going to happen, the legal procedure is you solicitor pays them direct, you have no say it, they get paid after the mortgage provider who has first charge.

No, these were secured loans, as such there was no need to go to court as they already had first/second charge on the house from when they lent the money..