Old CCJ, new understanding

Jwilks2279

A couple of years ago now I was contact by my mortgage provider, informing me of a concerning debt. This was the first step in discovering I had picked up a CCJ for a failure to pay an invoice which I had never received. A very brief summary is:

Company A was the maintenance company for a flat I let out. The sent me invoices by e-mail only (even said that on the invoices), I paid them.

At some point Company A pass on responsibility to Company B. At this time it appears they failed to pass on my e-mail address or phone number. Only my postal address, which was out of date. I hadn't updated the postal address because it wasn't used, so I didn't really think of it.

Company B sent invoices to the old postal address and obviously got no response. No other efforts were made to contact me.

Debt collection gets involved. Same story, letters only, old address, I am oblivious.

Eventually they submit a CCJ and give the court my old address. The court also sends letters to that incorrect address, obviously I don't get them either.

After the CCJ finds against me (or whatever the terminology is) someone decides to contact my mortgage company, and they contact me.

I get in contact with the debt collection people. A bit of back and forth, I make my case, and they stop replying for a few months, so I figure they've agreed.

No, after a few months they come back saying that I still owe them money.

I go to Citizens Advice who tell me not to bother fighting it. I'll only end up wasting money going to court.

I go back to the debt collection agency and reluctantly agree to pay, however I point out they have got their sums wrong and the amount owed is actually about half what they claimed. Once the sum is corrected I pay and the CCJ is marked as satisfied.

Now, two years later, I find that the damn thing is killing my credit rating, but it looks like I am sh*t out of luck for doing anything about it. Too much time elapsed etc. Yes, I probably should have realised the impact at the time, but I've never been in debt for anything, never missed any kind of payment. This was completely alien to me. I thought it was bad enough that I was having to pay for something that wasn't really my fault. I never considered that it could be significantly worse than that.

It was a horrible few months to go through in the first place, and part of me is just resigned to accepting that I am going to find life more expensive for a few years before the CCJ rightly falls off my file.

I am still cross about how patently unfair the whole system is, but seeing how I can't even get a half decent credit card, despite being, practically speaking very eligible for one, I have to wonder if there is anything I can do. So I thought I would drop this here, and see if anyone has a similar experience and whether I am right to be so resigned to the impossibility of improving the situation.

sourcrates

The judgement will show for 6 years, and will then be automatically removed.

A "judgment by default" commonly happens when an old address is provided, its an old trick used by some debt purchasing companies, but probably just an unfortunate error in this case though.

Not much you can do, time will remove it.

etienneg

This comment is not meant to be critical or inflamatory, but rather a suggestion to OP and others for the future.

You say you didn't update the postal address with Company A "because it wasn't used". Well, it may not have been used for anything that had happened thus far, but it is important and it should have been kept up to date. Postal addresses are used for legal and security purposes. (Whether or not that should be the case is immaterial - it's the way things are for now.) If it had been up to date, in all probability none of the above would have happened.

Then, did you not notice the absence of invoices?

Later, when the debt collection people stopped contacting you, why did you assume they had agreed (not to want the money)? If they were going to stop pursuing you, they would have told you explicitly.

It's always better to avoid issues in the first place (in this case by keeping data up to date, following up on missing invoices, not making assumptions) rather than trying to solve them once they have occurred, which (as OP has found) may well not be possible at that point.