My wife received a letter from them today though addressed in her maiden name requesting payment of an alleged debt that knows she has never had (my wife is the careful one with her money).

She is signed up to Experian credit checking service and has been for a while and this apparent debt doesn’t appear on their records either.

Scam to be ignored or otherwise?

Having looked around the internet a bit it screams scam to me but have any of you lovely people any other experience?

It’s just a speculative fishing exercise

They will have probably bought a lot of very old debt that previous companies have given up on & started trying to find the debtors using your good lady to do the investigation for them i.e spamming everyone with a similar name

i had a similar letter from a debt collection company in november last year. i rang them up and after talking to a resonable nice woman she said that the debt was 8 yrs old on a finance agreement i defaulted on with richer sounds. she wanted payment there and then by credit card. of course i was not going to give her anything and told her i was going to collect evidence from the bank to prove i had paid it. she then said that if i wanted to pay now i could pay only half of the debt and that would settle it!!!! i told her i was going to contact my bank and my solicitor and i would write to her with evidence and a covering letter. 2 days latter i recieved a call from a very aggressive young man saying if i didnt pay he would send in bailiffs, go to court etc. i have a friend who works for trading std’s and told him what he cant & can do. in the end i sent an edited copy of the bank statements to them telling them i was not going to pay and they were in breach of credit collectors regulations. i sent this by recorded so i had prove of arrival. not heard anything since.

i would’nt just ignore it as credit ratings are precious things nowadays. dont pay just get proof.

good luck

Yep – just last week in fact (the address on the letter was Glasgow I think). As Uplink says, they were just fishing. I emailed to ask for details and they asked if had ever lived at a particular address. I hadn’t and let them know; they replied to say that was the end of the matter (although there’s a niggly feeling they might be back).

I’ve had 3 or 4 of these over the years. Always just rung them up, said “Not, me guv” and that’s been the end of it.

As above, they have a name to track down and they just contact everyone with a similar name/address.