Won this btw The agents paid me £2300 in the face ofa default judgment which they had attempted to respond to with characteristic funny uselessness

Ayo Will try and keep this condensed: I was a British Gas customer in 2008-9. I haven't been since. Piecing the narrative together from repeated phone calls to their customer service guys, what appears to have happened is they've noticed that they overcharged me by about £50 on an electric bill of about £100 I paid in 2008. Their response to this was to send a cheque for the full amount - not the amount they overcharged me by - to the address it related to, even though I have moved twice since then and gave them a forwarding address for my final bill when I moved out. I have no contact with the original address and hate the landlord's guts anyway. This was in February this year, and I knew nothing about it, because I didn't live there. In April I started getting phonecalls from hopeless BG debt guys telling me I owed them £50, but I couldn't get any sense out of them because they didn't know the situation and had to hang up cos they kept putting me on hold while I was at work to try and read off their computers. In response to a couple of these calls, me/wifey phoned the customer services number several times, established the narrative above and got told by about three different guys that they were going to cancel the cheque they'd issued to the wrong address and reissue me a new one for the correct amount they owe me (ie about £50) to my current address, which I gave them. It's never happened on any of them and the bills for money they accidentally sent me that I never received have kept coming, all of them wrong, wrong, wrong. Fantastically, instead of using the updated address I gave them to send me the correct amount of money, what they've done is passed it on to Moorcroft Debt Recovery to send me letters about how they will have to advise British Gas to take me to small claims court if I don't pay. Today one of them phoned me and asked for my debit card number. I told him what had gone on and he said he'd get in touch with BG. I realise now I should have just told him to do one but enh. Anyway, I don't owe them money, they've got nothing, I know the DCAs are just risible snapping lapdogs with no power and my experience of the Small Claims system means I'm not exactly concerned that the mailed fist of completely wrong justice is gonna close round my neck anytime soon; I wanted to check specifically about complaining and getting them to go away. What I wanted to check is: Should I basically be sending my written complaint to BG's complaints e-mail, their managing director and OFGEM? Is that enough? Also, for three months of bills, phone calls and debt collectors chasing me because they were too inept to send the actual amount of money they overcharged me to an address I live at, should I be chancing my arm on demanding they compensate me in some way or is the best I can hope for to get the £50 they appear to owe me and a bit of peace and quiet?

Hi - I'm the claimant in a case detailed here - http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?266357-Pursuing-a-judgment-against-an-overseas-landlord-via-a-UK-letting-agent#post3016201 - it's a housing thing but because my latest headache is more about nuts n'bolts small claims procedure than the particulars of the claim I've posted it here, sorry if this is wrong. Anyway: I made a claim against an agent for various disrepair in a flat I rented once, they filed a defence, we applied to amend the claim form to add the landlord as a defendant and attended a direction hearing to get permission from a district judge to do this. The judge set a date for defence which the agent agreed to (themselves and on behalf of the LL who they represent), we filed the amended claim form with the court immediately afterwards and were basically advised to sit back and wait for further developments. After nobody filed a defence, I recently applied for default judgment but received a letter back asking for proof that we'd served the amended claim on the defendant, ie a certificate of service. My understanding based on what the court staff had told me was that because the agent was there and agreed to it, a date of service was specified in the order granted, and we'd paid £40 to amend the claim and hand it in to the court, the court would then serve the amended claim on the defendants along with appropriate pack of forms for defence etc. The court staff I recently spoke to on the phone basically said that we should have served it ourselves though, and that we now needed to do this. I'm a little uneasy about this becacse I've been bad advice by the court staff before that's delayed/complicated my case. I thought that the court serving the forms was kind of the default option because it's reliable and they can send the relevant additional forms from their end. Should I actually re-serve the papers myself, and if so should I be helpfully printing off various copies of the forms they need to fill in to respond to the claim? (This is partially based on me imagining that I've read a thread here where this happened to someone and they just had to write back saying "the court did this" - I can't find it if it exists)

Yeah, it seems likely. Do I have to tell the agent when/if I get default judgment? Am I supposed to do that and then try to enforce 28 days later if I don't hear back? Any idea how long it takes to get back to the stage of having a court date for a hearing if they do get the default judgment set aside?

I have a default judgment form good to go. Can I claim interest on this form if I didn't request it in my original claim? If I just say I want the money to be paid immediately, will the court then decide which of the two defendants should pay it or should I specify one myself for any reason? Thanks for the initial replies by the way.

Pretty sure the judge at the direction hearing ordered for it to be landlord c/o agent AND agent separately, both as defendants. (My understanding had been that the case would have no basis if it was just against a letting agent)

Hi - I've been involved in a County Court claim against an overseas landlord (via the large-ish UK letting agent managing the property) to reclaim some rent because of extensive disrepair and infestation in our previous rental property when we first moved into it, and both parties' disinterest in remedying it. After a direction hearing where it was confirmed that the claim would be served to the landlord care of his UK address, ie the letting agent, neither party has now responded to the claim. The agreed deadline was almost a month ago. The agent had provided an inaccurate, disingenuous defence when the papers were originally served to them as the sole defendant due to a clerical error at the court, but they have not resubmitted this. I gather I now need to apply for a judgement to be enforced, so I'm gonna speak to a CABureau on the phone today and then try and do this. Given how much the defendants have dragged their heels so far I'm anticipating them trying to have it set aside. Am I right in thinking that I should wait for 28 days after the judgment is granted before trying to enforce it? I've read conflicting things. Also, how does that work - are they told about the judgment when it's made so they can settle, but they can't apply for it to be set aside unless I apply for it to be enforced? There's been a predictable amount of buck-passing and denial of responsibility, and if anyone has any experience of this sort of thing (ie claiming from overseas disinterested landlord via local, incompetent letting agent), I'd be grateful for any forewarnings of any further potential pitfalls at this stage of proceedings, or a prognosis of how likely we are to get any money back any time soon. Also, what type of enforcement options are best given that the landlord is overseas? I think the property is still being let by the same agent. They are a quite large company but I don't anticipate that a judge would be able to make them pay me back the money, even though they were largely responsible for the problems. That said, the judge did make both them and the landlord defendants at the direction hearing, as opposed to just solely the LL care of the agent. Any advice appreciated.