Goldfish, credit file and blame

Rudeshark

Hi there.

Hopefully someone out there can help me with some advice on how to proceed with this problem...

My wife has a Goldfish credit card that she rarely uses. We moved house just over a year ago and as a matter of course we changed our address with all our cards and banks.

Last September my wife used her Goldfish card to buy something and then forgot about it, expecting the statement as usual. We hadn't had any statements for a while because the balance was always £0.

At the start of April, we suddenly got a statement at the new address to say that she was 6 months overdue for payment. She immediately called them and they confirmed that the statements had been sent to the previous address and that they'd been returned to Goldfish and the account frozen. As I said, the card is hardly used and so this freeze never came to light.

Goldfish seemed to accept responsibilty for this and refunded all the interest that had accrued. My wife cleared the actual balance and everything was fine.

Today I went to the Nationwide to get a mortgage extension to do some home improvements. Everything was fine until they ran a credit check. It flagged up my wife as having a non-paid credit card. Straight away I realised what it was and after explaining to the mortgage adviser, they accepted it had been Goldfish's error and said that if we had a statement from Goldfish showing the refunded interest and a letter from Goldfish explaining the situation then it'd be fine.

Inevitably when my wife phoned Goldfish, they claim that they never had a change of address notification and that they can't do anything about the credit rating stuff.

The unanswered questions here are (which were all put to them but the idiot on the phone was just a call centre drone)...

- If Goldfish aren't accepting blame, why were they so ready to refund the interest for six months even though they thought the situation serious enough to freeze the account?

- How did Goldfish suddenly get a change of address on the 18th March this year to be able to send the statement to us which first notified us of this overdue account?

- Even though they were the ones causing my wife's credit rating problems, why won't they fix it?

- How can we fix the credit rating if Goldfish refuse to do it? I'm guessing that with this on the credit rating, we're stuffed for any kind of credit card/loan/mortgage?

Anything you want to comment on would help us with this situation.

As it stands Goldfish have a "call out" for a manager to contact us about it. It would be good to be armed with something.

Thanks

RS.

nickmack

Rudeshark wrote: »

- If Goldfish aren't accepting blame, why were they so ready to refund the interest for six months even though they thought the situation serious enough to freeze the account?

- How did Goldfish suddenly get a change of address on the 18th March this year to be able to send the statement to us which first notified us of this overdue account?

These are the questions best answered by Goldfish. I can't see how they can deny receiving the change of address if they have sent correspondence to your new house, if they've not been recently notified.