Beware of Scam debt recovery

mlz1413

Today a High Court Enforcement Officer rang my business and said he was enforcing an unpaid debt and would be attending within 3 hours to be take payment or take goods.

I told him I had no idea what he was talking about and he said he was phoning ahead because he could see our company didn't have any other debts or late payments.  After several minutes of getting various details from him (no personal info) he gave me a case number and a phone number to  the court that had issued the enforcement.

This was a Norwich number (were Money Claims Online is based).

I got a recorded message to say it was Norwich Magistrates Court with other info in the message.  Very believeable.

Spoke to a man who grilled me about how I didn't know about this debt.  He gave me more details and said he could ask for an appeal process, but I needed to pay the CCJ value to put the case on hold and then i had 28 days to appeal and get my money back. 

Basically I have been scammed and my company has lost £5374.

If I knew bailiff and court procedure I could have picked up on a couple of things, but I am naive to these details.

I am a pessimist, so to be taken in has shocked me.

I wanted to share my experience. Sad, frustrating and annoying experience.

Please be aware that any phone calls regardless of how important they sound could be scams.

prowla

Generally any phone calls (or emails) demanding money should be treated with suspicion and any checks should be done by independently going to the correct bank/authority web addresses rather than links they tell you.

QrizB

No help to the OP, but this exact scam was in BBC R4s "Scam Secrets" a week ago.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002jfbx

mlz1413

Thanks QrizB, that was the scam,  but for work not personal. 
Personally I know I would not have missed anything.

But because it was a business debt I did remember agreeing to a single payment for something media/charity/donation  based that I then stopped or didn't agree to, so it had the element of truth.

QrizB

Don't blame yourself too much.

These people are professionals, working with a script, and have rehearsed their performance at length.

metropolis090

Thanks for warning others – scammers are getting way too good at imitating official court processes.