here is the lastest communication - any advice would be appreciated. From: Jackie Appleby [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 6:53 PM To: 'Ron' Subject: RE: 179429 - Appleby Hi Ron Thanks for the e-mail – yes I had some concerns as to the legality of the collection method of the debt, and Steve did indeed provide me with some information regarding that and link has now supplied us with a copy of the same letter . I am pretty sure that Collectcanada are following the rules as they should be regarding this matter but seemingly Link Financial is not. We were never advised by them of this debt until Steve wrote to us a couple of months ago and the letter we now have from Link, assigning you as their collectors here in Canada is the first time we have heard from them. We have sought legal advice regarding this and have been advised that Link need to be able to prove that they own the debt firstly, this can be proven by them supplying us with a copy of the credit agreement for the credit card (we have never heard of Link Financial and as I stated to Steve with fraud being such a big thing these days we need a little more that a letter on their headed paper saying that they own the debt to prove this – I am sure you can understand this) Secondly in order to pursue a debt under Canadian Law they have to have a court judgment from a UK court saying that they are allowed to do this. They would have needed to have been to court in the UK for this judgment whilst we were living at a British address and this as far as we are aware has never happened. Are you wanting to contact Link for this information or would you like me to write to them directly to ask for it? Thanks Jackie Jackie, The bottom line here is that Link has legally purchased this debt and you and Alan do owe the money. If we provided this proof for you today, do you have the money to pay this debt off? This is nothing more than a stall tactic to avoid responsibility to pay a debt that is owed. Under Canadian Law, a court judgment is needed if the debt is to be pursued legally in court. It is not needed to prove that you ran this debt up and are avoiding trying to do the right thing and repay it. It also does not change the fact that you do owe the money for this card. Please contact me in regards as to when we will be receiving payment for this debt. Jackie, Reply from Link in regards to your e-mail to me. Ron Hi In short what the customer has described is not accurate. Under English law, which this account was signed and governed, the previous vendor is not obliged to inform the customer of the sale. Our first contact with the customer was obviously via Collect Canada as you are our agents. To write to the customer prior to instructing you would have complicated the issue for the customer. I will send the customer our Notice Of Assignment. This letter will clarify the situation but will ask the customer to contact Link direct as this is a generic letter. There is no requirement to go to court. The customer has defaulted this account, hence the sale. If the customer disputes the account then kindly request her to put her reasoning in a signed letter. The last recorded payment on the account was £50.00 on 31/07/2007, this is almost 2 years. This is unacceptable. I have no problems if the customer wishes to discuss this matter with me direct.

thanks everyone! So I am going to write to Link and ask them for a copy of the CCA and the court judgement indicating that they could pass details on to a Canadian DCA to collect the monies owed (I am pretty sure they won't have the Court paperwork). Thay hould stump them for a while, if they do manage to produce anything I may go down the F&F route. The debt is about 6000gbp the letter says but I know the Canadian DCA has only asked us for $9000 so not quite syre how the maths works there! so we should be able to offer around $1100. It's just the canadian DCA I am worried about - what is to stop them messing with our credit file as we are refusing to pay at this stage?

Thanks again - whats an F&F? Link financial already have our address so writing to them is not a major drama. As to the debts themselves they are all unsecured credit cards and loans. no major secured ones or taxes - we at least paid those before we left. We would also have been out of the country when any court action was taken. We alos have no intention of returning to the UK to live, just the occasional visit but that won't be for a while. Do link have no legal way to enforce a debt over here? That was one of the questions I asked the Canadian DCA and the seemed to ignore that one just sending me a copy of the letter that link sent them asking them to act. If the debt were to be added to our credit file here I would just appeal it would I? Thanks again!

Thanks everyone for the advice. I am very new to this game and i am afraid I don't understand a lot of the terminology you are using. My understanding is that i need to write/contact the canadian debt company and advise that I am corresponding with link and that i won't be paying anything until I have offical paperwork from link? Then I wirte to link and with a CCA request - what is a CCA and why do I need to ask for that? Thanks

Hi everyone so here is my story that i'd like some help with if anyone is able to! My husband and I left England in Feb 2007 for a new life in Canada. We had various resons for leaving but it was not necisarily to run away from our debts. We had a total of about 90,000gbp in debt across various different companies, including banks, store cards, credit card ect. Upon our arrival in Canada and know that Canada has a reciprocal agreement with the UK, I started to investigate what could be done about our situation and contacted debt line in teh UK who were incredibly helpful. they sent us a pack with various debt information and said our first port of call was to contact all the companies we owed money to with our new address details and explain that we were not in a position to repay our debts (only hubby was working for the first year of our time here and money was incredibly tight). We were to ask all of them to stop adding any interest to the debts and to give us a final value of debt so that we could make various offers to the regarding repayments. Debtline advised us that we only needed to offer a minimum amount for each of the debts and that the likelyhood was that most companies would write of the debts as it was too costly to recover the monies but that it was not guaranteed. Once we recived our replies we were told to write to all of them again outlining all of the debts we owed and asking that they considered writing off our debts. If this was unsucessful there was a possibility of applying for bankruptcy in the UK as we had no assets and are currently renting our property in Canada this might have worked in our favour. As it happed only 1 company responed to our intial letter which was MBNA, it was a demand for the full outstanding amount of debt - about 6,000gbp in all. I couldn't get over that they responded and no one else did - not even LLoyds TSB whom we owed over 30,000 gbp to. Now we probably didn't make the brightest decision of all with the MBNA debt and hoped that if we ignored them they might go away ( I know not the best thing to do) they sent us several letters that were generic stating that if we didn't pay they would pass it over to a debt collection agency. Now 18 months on it has been handed over to link financial who have appointed a canadian company to collect the debt. We recived no notification fo this untill the debt was in the hands of the Canadian collector. We have been peaking to them regulary to smooth things over and set up a payment plan. Now a friend of ours from the UK who recently visited told me about this website and said to do some investigation as to what we can do. I was on teh understanding that the reciprical agreement was only enforced if the debt had been sold to a canadian company and to do that the selling company had to obtain a court order to do so. The Canadian company has confirmed that they do not own the debt, just that they are collecting on behalf of link. I ask Canada collect how we could be sure that the money that they collected was going towards our debt with MBNA as we have no credit agreement with either them or Link and I was concerned as fraud is a major probelm over here. I also asked them how they were able to persue the debt under Canadian law when the agreement was taken out under english law. All they were able to offer me was reassurance that this was not a fraudlant activity (of course you would say that even if it was) and a copy of the letter from Link asking canada collect to act on their behalf. So my questions are - is there anything we can do about this? If we don't pay Canada collect can the debt be added to our Canadian credit file (we are saving really hard right now for a downpayment on a house and don't want to affect our credit) Are we safe in thinking the other debts have gone away or should we declare ourselves bankrupt in the UK? Are link finacial using scare tactics to get us to repay? Am I right in thinking we can make a really low offer to pay the debt and have the rest written off? We are desperately trying to get ourselves sorted out. We know we could have hadled things better with our debts and are not proud of the situation we are in but we really could do with life giving us a break riight now. Thanks for all your help!

Hi Everyone I am new to this forum lark so I am hoping you guys can point me in the right direct. I am originally from Hampshire in the UK but my family and I moved to Canada 18 months ago. I joined the site as i need some advice around the debts we left behind in the UK - in particular 1 that has been passed to link financial and in turn they have appointed a canadian debt company to collect the money. I would like to get some further info around this, like why we were not advised this was happening and if there is anything we can do about it. Can some one point me in the right direction as to where I would post my questions? Thanks!