Thread: Welcome finance- need help :(

Welcome Finance
Compliance Services
Mere Way
Ruddington
Nottingham
NG11 6NZ

20/02/09

Dear Welcome Finance,

R.e Hire Purchase Agreement Number xxxxxxxxx

I write with regards to the above Car Hire Purchase agreement which was taken out 21/02/06 and is due to run for 36 months, ending 21st February 2009- that is tomorrow.

I made a telephone call to your branch yesterday (19th February) to determine the exact amount oweing on the account and was horrified to be told by your staff that there is a balance of over £2000,00 remaining on the account!
I was put through to an account manager (Theresa) who did not seem to have a clue what she was doing.
At first she told me there was several missing payments and also over £800.00 oweing in charges levied to the account for returned Direct Debits, telephone calls, letters and home visits.
This is a ridiculously high amount to charge a customer!
To my knowledge, we have always later paid any failed direct debits by debit or credit card over the telephone or by post.
There should be no missing payments.

Firstly, may I point out that your charges are unfair under Consumer Law and I request that you waiver all charges levied against our account.
Should you not waiver these unfair charges, I shall be opening a Court Claim against you with the intention of proving your charges are unfair and claiming back any charges paid plus interest and additional costs.

With regards to the ‘several missing payments’, I have asked on many occasions that our account manager Nolene send me a full statement of account clearly showing payments made and a full breakdown of charges levied.
I have to date never received this information despite my repeated requests!
Interestingly whilst speaking to Theresa on the telephone last night, she told me she could see requests on the system made by Nolene to your Head Office to send me out this information. I am assuming that your Head Office did not want me to see this information and therefore did not send it to me despite the many requests.
I would imagine that this in itself is a breach of the Data Protection Act as you have failed to provide requested account information.
I intend to raise this issue in any Court Claim I make against you.

Accompanied with this letter you will also find a request for reimbursement of mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance.
On taking out this agreement with you, my husband and I were led to believe that Payment Protection Insurance was a necessity and had to be taken out as part of the Car Hire Purchase agreement.
You did not offer us the chance to provide our own insurance, nor did anybody from your firm explain to us why the Insurance you provided was necessary.
On signing the contract, you had already highlighted that we wished to purchase the Payment Protection Insurance and Shortfall Extra insurance which we were required to sign to confirm.
As the Car Hire Purchase was taken out and signed at a local Car Dealer Garage, there was no representative from Welcome Finance present when we signed the contract and we were basically shown which signature boxes required our signatures by the Garage Staff.
The Payment Protection Insurance signature box was one of them and it was already highlighted by you, indicating that it was a necessity as part of the agreement.
This is false selling and we intend to seek full reimbursement of the Payment Protection Insurance from you plus interest.
Please see the written request for reimbursement attached.

Finally, I now request for the umpteenth time that you send out a full statement of account showing total payments made by us and a full breakdown of charges levied to the account.

I would like to point out that as listed in the contract the goods were priced at £3995.00 and with interest we were required to pay the sum of £6,301.36 for the goods.
According to my calculations this sum has been overpaid, therefore the goods belong to us and the rest of the balance paid by us is now oweing to us in reimbursement.
I have cancelled our weekly direct debit payment to you accordingly and shall be making no further payment to the account unless it has been fairly demanded by The Courts after being proved it is fairly owed.

I request that all further contact between us is made in writing.
Should I receive harassing phonecalls from your firm, I will be adding ‘harrassment’ to the list of complaints against your company and I would like you to communicate this to your staff.
The account is now ‘in dispute’ and I will not deal with or discuss the account with your branch staff, nor will I discuss the account by telephone.
As it will be becoming a legal matter, I will accept no other contact than ‘in writing’ so I can retain proof of the contact between us as evidence for The Courts.
I will be keeping copies of all contact between us as well as sending my contact to you by recorded delivery and retaining proof of this.

I do hope that you will not see this as an opportunity to levy further ridiculous charges to our account for ‘telephone calls’ or ‘letters’.
Any such charges will be fully disputed and the issue raised in a Court Claim, therefore I strongly suggest that you make your branch staff well aware of the situation and stop them from making unnecessary contact.

I am allowing you a very reasonable period of fourteen days to send out the account information requested and to submit your response.
Should I not hear from you after this time has elapsed, I will accordingly prepare and commence our case against you.

I have been in contact with Trading Standards regarding this matter and am also seeking legal advice.

We do hope that you will resolve this matter fairly and amicably and are allowing you the chance to do this.
However, I will not hesitate to commence the aforesaid action if need be.


We look forward to hearing from you



Yours Sincerely




xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hi EL
I would send them a SAR it will cost you a £10 postal order and send it special delivery so you have proof of delivery (Keep the reciepts from the above) Amend this to suit your own requirements, also remember this takes 40 days + post delivery times. The info you recieve should then enable you to see how much their penalty charges are (so you can claim them back if excessive) and over info they hold on you. I think they should have sent you a statement of account each year for your records.

Your address

Their Address

Date

DATA PROTECTION ACT 1998
Subject access request


Dear Sir/Madam
Your name: xxxxxx
Account No/ No’s



I understand that you currently hold details of my personal and financial information within your internal record systems with regard to personal loan accounts And or credit cards

Please supply me with a complete list of transaction and charges relating to my history with your organization, INCLUDING Loans and or credit cards, payment protection insurance and other products. Alternatively a complete set of statements for the accounts or associated accounts is acceptable. I would be grateful if you would provide the following for ALL accounts or associated accounts I have held with your organization:
-Full copies of all contracts which you believe exist or have existed between myself and your organization, including true copies of any documents you hold in support of the same.

- A complete list of all transactions or statements relating to ALL of my Loan Accounts and or credit card with your organization.

-Copies of all documents which include any of my personal information including copies of any contacts or invoices, emails or computer records containing my personal information, or any records which pertain to this information.

-Full copies or transcripts of any correspondence in postal, email or any other format which you have entered into with any individual, organization or third party which contains my personal or financial, or which pertains to me.

- Where any previous information or records held have been deleted or disposed of, the methods used to do so, including dates, certificates or references confirming details of destruction. Where you are unable to provide such certificates, please provide a declaration, signed by an authorised officer of your company, confirming the dates and methods of destruction of this data.

-Full hard copy print outs of my personal or financial information, held in a digital, magnetic or any other format which is held in any archives, backups or other storage devices / locations.

I enclose a cheque in the sum of £10 to cover your fee.

IF YOU UNABLE TO DEAL WITH THIS REQUEST, YOU SHOULD IMMEDIATELY FORWARD IT TO THE PERSON WITHIN YOUR ORGANISATION RESPONSIBLE FOR DATA PROCECTION.

I look forward to hearing from you in the first instance of receipt.

Yours faithfully


Your name

Sign your signature and put a line through it so you will know if you see it again:o You never know

They have 40days to comply under the Data Protection Act, but do be nice and allow some time for postage. Which should always be by recorded delivery, so you can prove that they did receive it.

AL

Hi again EL,

Your first letter is long and conveluted, they will not read it all

Send the SAR and wait until you get all the figures, then you'll know exactly where you stand. From there, we can work out what letters to send and what you require them to do.

JOgs

If you do not recieve a response from your SAR you should make a complaint to the Information Commisionars Office. I do not believe that by sending a SAR is putting the account into dispute, it is asking for information for you to to check the account is and its agreements are in order, if they are not then thats the time to put the account into dispute.

Go with the SAR and see what comes back.