Debt recovery company CARS (Creditlink Account Recovery Solutions) sent me a demand for £55.53, including a £20 surcharge, for ignoring requests for payment. There was no information about what the debt was for, and I hadn’t received previous requests. CARS told me I owed Darwin insurance a premium on a Hyundai car. The date of birth and first and last name of the debtor were the same as my own, but the middle name was different. I assured the agent they had got the wrong guy, but they weren’t having any of it.
Darwin also insisted I was the person it was looking for. Eventually, it agreed to pass the case to the fraud department, which quickly spotted the middle name discrepancy. It appears the debtor has the same date of birth as me and, when he couldn’t be located, CARS sent the letter to anyone with the same name and birthday. Darwin and CARS haven’t responded.
JC, Liverpool
The letter you received is as uninformative as it is threatening. It informs you of recovery proceedings for an unexplained sum. Had you not been tenacious in questioning it, it could have led to a county court judgment and a wrecked credit rating.
IGO4, which owns Darwin, assures me you were the only one contacted, and it lobbed a goodwill cheque of £150 your way after my contact. CARS did not respond to me. It did, however, write to you, laying the blame squarely on credit reference agency TransUnion, which it employs to trace errant debtors and which, it claimed, validated your address on the strength of the shared name and birth date. It says, for certainty, it should then have linked your credit records to the debtor’s last known address.
TransUnion is having none of it. “We highlighted to CARS that the information provided was based solely on the criteria of name, surname and date of birth, as we did not have additional data to verify this further,” it says. “We’ve been in touch with CARS to review how they are using data we provide and it has adjusted its processes accordingly.” It confirms that your credit record has not been affected.
If you discover a company holds erroneous data, and it fails to rectify its records, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
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