I renew membership of a gym last year and the day after a thanks for joining’ email came through. I emailed back and said that i’m not joining i’m setting up a DD (the first 15 months was £100 one off payment on debit card – never signed a contract) and I was extending my membership on a monthly basis. I paid the £9.99 for the month ahead and for about 9 months carried on paying the £9.99 a month.

obviously, I only actually attended about three times 😆

I enquired about giving notice and nobody would call me or see me so I cancelled the DD mandate.

Cue the letters and fines from Debt recovery business, who are adamant I signed a contract, yet can’t seem to be able to pull one out of a file anywhere.

After continually being bounced back to Xercise4less I ended up credit checking them, getting their MD’s home address and sent him a fairly snotty letter telling him his gym’s shite and the company he uses to administer the gym memberships are chasing me for £206 for not paying the final £9.99 payment, and to sort it.

Through investigations I realised the email they sent to ‘thank me for joining’ came from a snap.co.uk domain.

Turns out, you join this place online through snap DDA and click a serious of tick boxes to ‘agree’ to their T’s and C’s.. When I paid the £9.99 i manually wrote my nab details for the DD on a piece of paper (which I queried at the time) and they said it would be shredded.

I’m utterly convinced someone at the gym has filled the application online HERE in my name (they would have had all the info to do so) and then it’s triggered the ‘thanks for joining’ email.

I have written to Harlands who own SnapDDA and also chase the debts and through a SAR request obtained the IP address of 1995625 (sure their should be dots in there somewhere) which filled the application in.

Obviously this is fraud, and they did this for my partner’s membership and about 5 of my mates.

Can this IP be located??

File a report on ActionFraud online. They may have previous complaints.

Without a court order for recovery of the debt there’s nothing they can do anyway, so just ignore them.

Post up the IP address and someone’ll tell you. IP address is xx.xx.xx.xx where xx is a number between 0 and 255.

Re debt recovery company

Send them this..

Dear Sir

Ref *****

I deny any debt to Xercize4less

Refer it back to your client and don’t contact me again
Any further contact will be considered harassment.

Yours Faithfully

If they do risk bothering you again there’s a formal procedure to go through
However they are safe to ignore if you want. The only thing NOT to ignore is proper stamped court papers. (Very unlikely)

In the mean time action fraud might be a good start, although I hear they are bloody unless.

Keep giving the MD hassle!

Realistically, as a ‘man in the street’, the closest you’re going to get in geolocating by IP address is “country.”

It will tell you who provides that address though (eg, BT, Sky etc). They will (well, should) know who that address will have been allocated to at a given bate and time, though it’s unlikely that they’ll tell you or, indeed, anyone else without a court order.

As for the debt collection agency, what Martyn said. 1) only ever deal with them in writing and if they ring you tell them to write to you and put the phone down. 2) It’s illegal for them to pursue a debt that they cannot prove, and is considered harassment if they persist. They have two options, prove it or **** off.

Interesting. I’m a happy customer of Xercise4less, and we were denied the option of paying up front this year. I’ll have a dig out of my T&Cs and put the cancellation date in my diary in case I give up going. Let us know how you get on.

Oh and geolocation isn’t worth it for tracking folk down. I’m in Doncaster and most of the databases seem to think I’m in Goole.

Google the IP address and you might get down to city level, that said my IP is incorrectly located.