The last update....

Friday a cheque for £1100 arrived, and on saturday the remaining £100 for costs hit my doorstep.

They never said anything in the letters, just a cheque. Oh well, I am in it for the money anyway. Courtesy letter to judge being drafted up now.

Capital One: I won!!!

I am finding the nature of this thread quite worrying...

It seems to me that a few people have raised the issue of privacy, and rather than addressing it, the status quo is being ardently defended.

Hi, hope you don't mind if I add my own thoughts on the matter. I will anyway.

This is from my perspective as a user of this site.

I recently decided that, rightfully or not, that I would like to claim for consequencial losses. The validity of my claim is not the point, however, the sensitivity of the data is.

Now I appreciate that there needs to be a balance between what is visible and what isn't, but if I could have restricted certain areas of my thread I would have appreciated it.

I posted my arguements for CL and later edited them out because I felt that such information was just too sensitive for me at this point for it to be made public. Well, despite having to register for this site. With 13000 members its hard not to class it as public.

If a 14 year old kid can click the enter box to access adult sites, I would be surprised if the banks didn't at least scan these forums. I would if I were them.

My voice as a customer of this forum is please allow, if possible, the possibility of restriciting users to certain areas. Enough for me to post ideas, poc drafts and so on, so that the people I have grown to trust and respect can point out their ideas on it. Not forever, just for a little while. Once it goes to court open it up to the public so that people can make their own educated ideas on the matter.

Maybe make it a payment option or base it on a referral system, that way you can balance the need for privacy. The majority of people will read and post in normal forums so they won't be affected, but in circumstances when certain sensitive issues want to be debated privately then that option would be there. I doubt that the majority of users would ever need such a facility, but it would be nice if it were an option.

Those were my opinions on the solution, the problem remains that as a customer of this site I would appreciate a privacy option.

Take the money and run!

Cheers bong...very interesting case.

Hahaha!!! Feel free to hijack as much as you want. That made me laugh. Numerology sounds interesting. I can date 3 main events in my life down to numbers....20:02 20 02 2002 as well as 4/4/4 and more recently 6/6/6 when I ended up in a car accident. Weird! I am also looking forward to 7/7/7 this year for a few reasons. Anyway...

The bottle of tequila got polished off, which meant that no guitar got played, plenty of beer was drunk and surprisingly never woke up with a hint of a hangover.

Just to carry on with the good vibes weekend...

Once the cheque from Crap One arrived on friday,I decided to buy a car stereo with it, got to the check out, and surprise, "sorry, we have revised our prices...its gone down £20". Does it get any better?

Got home and CrapOne had sent the remaining £100 for costs. Nice! And finally......

a high profile tester case!

Fair play, I had one of those courtesy of Crap One the other week after they settled and removed the default. lol

Yeah, you were in quite a good mood last week, and a well deserved one as well. It sure does, the beer always tastes better when it's paid by a big faceless multinational.

I originally asked for £1200 and they sent £1100 and refused to pay costs. Quick letter to the judge and yesterday £1100 landed on my doorstep and the extra £100 landed today. Sweet!!!

Anyway...this is it for the moment, caught up on things, time to pack the guitar in the car, stop of at the supermarket for "refershments" and drive up to a quiet spot in the highlands for a hell of a party with a hell of a good bunch of mates.

Cheers Tanz,

Yes, I have had some excellent advice so thank you all again.

The informed decision has been reached...going for CI & CL.

Anyway, last post for a day or two as Capital One's money has now been cleared and I am off to get wasted!!

Happy Easter to all!!

Oh well, back to square one then.

The money they are offering you is a "full and final" settlement.

What if you send the usual letter that you are accepting the money as part settlement and that you will be pursing the rest of it in a court of law? Just because they have said it is their final offer it does not mean that you do have to accept it as a final offer. Take it as part payment.

From what I have read on the scotscourt website, a claim for over £1500 can be initially submitted through a summary action, it is then the judge to decide if it can be dealt or if it goes to a court of session and I would be inclined to believe that at that point it would go stay in a sumary court.

Just a technicality anyway. They want you to accept the payment. Hold on and you will get the money. Accept it as part payment and carry on with it.

Whilst this most certainly won't do any harm, I can almost gaurentee that it won't do any good either. Lloyds are a different proposition to HSBC - traditionally HSBC have always paid around AQ return time, whereas Lloyds will not settle in most cases until the court date is immenant. SC&M just don't do negotiating I'm afraid!

I really know how to pick em. I was with Lloyds while at uni, terrible bank. Came to Scotland and jointed TSB, half decent bank and then they merged...BOOM disaster. By comparison Capital One on the other hand were sweet, immediately offered me part settlement after my prelim letter.

Glad to see the feud is over, one of the qualities I value most about this site is the coming together of ideas and the discussions it creates.

Am I allowed to ask here if its possible to accept the £1900 goodwill gesture I have been offered and advise them that I will be sueing for the additional £750 thru the small claims court in Scotland?

Very good question! But terrible answer, I don't know. Very interesting though!

Lucid & Glenn,

Yes I was joking, well semi-joking, I am joking about 120 hours but serious about costs. It would be intersting to see what the upper limit would be on this. I'll drop by your thread Glenn and have a look at that. I think 51 hours seems like a realistic figure. Seems to mirror Teebum v Abbey (50 hours) and yes Lucid, you need to account properly for the charges, quantify it properly and make it realistic, i'm wanting to get paid on it afterall.

120 hours would have made £1000 ish, I must be getting greedy

What if I included all you guys as associates, and get them to pay 20 hours each??? Post a comment & qualify for a bonus. I think I could squeeze that one in past the CI and CL

CONGRATULATIONS

Haha, thanks! Yeah they said 14 working days for the cheque so I expected that would have arrived around the 16th so really good timing as i'f off for 4 days now.

Think it's gonna be a bottle of tequila, some good friends and a guitar. Maybe shoot my own home made debbie does dallas.

Actually i feel far from the bottom of an American Football pile up (how can they use the word football beats me). A wise man once said:

Try and discern the fear-based from the logic-based negatives.

Once you cut out the "ARE YOU CRAZY" posts there have been some excellent bits of advice, so with advice like that its easy to feel on top of the world. I am more confident with my claim and the whole process, so much work still to do for it but with 20k + life really does take a different twist.

Soundtrack "Seven Nation Army" I'm gonna fight it all, a seven nation army couldn't hold me down.

Edit: nice folk Capital One, offered part settlement immediately and added £100 for stress & distress, very kind of them. The first bottle of tequila is on them!

Thanks Els great advice,

CL is quantifiable and something you, in your professional capacity, should find relatively easy to calculate. Damages, in the context of deterioration of well-being, health, lifestyle, career, confidence, self-respect, defamation, etc.

Yes i am confusing damages with consequenital losses. Thankfully my ammened charge list to lloyds hasn't gone out yet. Quick edit required. (still threatening them at the moment)Thanks alot.

Glenn,

As I recall there is provision in the DPA Sec 13 or 14 perhaps (?) which gives subjects the right to claim for damages. I would need to go look to refresh my mind as to what they say in detail, but I'm sure they are there.

True, i think the principles are there..would have to read it all again to find out how much is valid. However, I could always add exemplary damages for breach of the data protection act. Another couple hundred quid.

Thanks for the support, I appreciate everyone who stops by, even if it is to call me nuts!

That's all you can do in life, pick yourself back up, rub the dust off, grab the guitar and carry on walking down that dusty old path.

I have had a lot of positive debate which is what I need. Its a credit to this site to be able to push forward ideas and have them analysed and torn apart. Then you can rebuild that same arguement better and stronger. Eventually, you will have a lot of very strong points, and the defence still has to go through them all and defend them. No standard templates accepted here, I have a lot of valid points, I want them all answered. hehe and I also get the chance to p**s em off. See? I can self-edit!

I think when it comes to power it is about understanding as much as you can about your opponent and the way to get at him. The more I understand about the court system the better prepared I will be. If I know when and how they are going to fight then I can duck and strike again and again. My power is the power of education! I just need to adapt to the battlefield.

On a happy note I now have 4 days off work and capital one's cheque landed on my doorstep today. £1100, woohoo. That was the tester case. Still a long way to go before I can properly celebrate, but some time off to recharge the batteries is still well deserved, after that i'm afraid it's no sleep until Brixton!

I am busy putting together a couple of spreadsheets that plot loans compared to different interest levels. Visualisation is always a great tool!!

Does anyone know any easy site that I can post them on?

Glenn, as always thanks!

Originally Posted by RedDeath

Thanks for the advice photoman, I do appreciate it.

 

As usual I will research every bit of advice offered. The way I see it with regards to cost, the worse I could expect would be around £7,500 which I would cover with my actual claim for the fees and 8%. That way I end up back at step 1, but 30 years from know I'll know that I fought for what I believe in and that probably means the most to me. MetallicA teaches you that!

Red, if you lose, you lose EVERYTHING not just the damages..... the court wont award you just the charges and just dismiss the damages aspect... and you will still then have to cover the costs and their legal fees (which could be tens of thousands), and wont get a bean from your claim to cover any of it !!

 

Whilst there is no doubt in my mind that if the court sees the claim as vexatious or seriously flawed fro a legal viewpoint then they could indeed strike the whole claim out. however, i do not see the striking out of the whole claim as a foregone conclusion and would very much be based on how the claim was put together and presented. its my view that the damages element of the claim could well be struck out but the remaining elements of the claim be allowed to proceed and the same way that has happened in some cases to charges older than six years.

 

Also this does not preclude me from claiming again at a later stage? Case gets thrown out, i try again just for charges and 8% scenario.

 

 

 

Taking it all the way into a court though is new territory for me and I will see how far I can go by myself before I seek legal advice. At this stage I think that I have the capability to go it alone, but I still have loads of time and if I don't feel the vibes then I am not going to go for it.

 

No legal firm will pick up a case half way through. They cannot take the risk of losing based upon your own previous errors.

 

Thats cool, I got the best representatives...CAG FORUM members!

 

If I lose because I calculated my charges wrong then fair enough, but if that means that they also have to stand in a court of law and publicly disclose their charges then I still walk away a winner.

 

They will have your case thrown out of court based upon your damages claim even before you even get into a court. That way they can avoid the pressure you may feel you can exert by pushing for disclosure.

 

I seriously doubt this, they would have to show the whole claim had no merit and if the claimant decided that he couldn't beat their arguments then there would be nothing to stop him acceding to a request to strike out that portion of the claim or submitting an amendment to the claim in

light of the defendants submission

 

So if I get this right...I go ahead and claim damages, they submit a defence asking for it to strike out. If I can not counter-argue their defence then I can still go on and ask for charges & CI and still not have them awarded costs.

 

Just to push the boundries a little further (he he) at that point I can ask for my own costs at £9.xx an hour? Would 120 hours be too many? The way i look at it if they could charge £7500 then I can certainly add some juice on this one as well.

 

 

 

Yeah, that was some seriously bad advice, she was under 16!!!

Nah only kidding...

The part that clicked was if you want to test a man's character.

Major decision time for me, loads of cash and values at stake and i am up against a big faceless company with an army of solicitors! The power comes from the power of the people, all the members on this site that post their ideas and advice, and the whole "are you crazy" part.

This was the thread that first put the idea into my head:

http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/rbs-bos-successes/49470-contractual-interest-details-case.html

I particularly like the style of the poc and its something that i am using as my main template.

The parts that i find intersting are paragraphs 57-59. In 59 in particular

Accordingly, the Claimant asks the court to grant aggravated and exemplary damages as detailed in Paragraphs 64(f) and 64(g) of these particulars.

Good way to lead to the money part and finally paragraph 64 a-b-c-d-e where he outlines the indivdiual charges. Something down the lines of:

a> the claims

b> the interest breaking it down into subsections either 29.8% or 8%

c>damages

d>costs

This seems like a really good way of outlining a claim. Particularly as he asks for individual "mini" claims if you can see my point. I.e "I want 29.8% (because of how it is explained) if not then give me 8% (cause I am due it)."

An extra section for damages again same modus operandi give me the damages as detailed or give me nothing.

So my question to the "power of the people" is this:

Would this still allow me to get at least some if not all the goodies?

I.e yes to claims, yes to CI and no to damages? Bit like getting six numbers on the lottery and missing the bonus ball?

Also, would this still leave me open to costs. Would that be enough to say that each party would cover their own costs? Can i add these kind of paragraphs into the claim form? Something down the lines of?

The Claimant asks that as he is a single litigant and despite months of attempted communications with the Defendant they have still not replied to any of his letters. (1 prelim, 1 LBA, 1 Final notice with extra 14 days, 1 Futrther final notice with ammended charges). That in the event of loss the Defendant is not allowed costs as this was the Claimants only method of disputing the charges after trying everything under the sun to get them to talk to him?

Just a thought...any potential?

Pro's: get out of jail free card.

Con's: my claim does not look so "confident" and professional. Bad etiquette maybe....

Thank you all again for the valuable advice. In the cold light of day light I still think I have a valid point to claim for damages.

They were my only bank, I put all of my money in the bank and they regularly & knowingly took out way more than what they should have. I feel I should be entitled to damages for this.

I feel I should be able to claim in England, because by telling me I can only claim in Scotland they are putting unfair terms in my agreement. I am after all the consumer I should be looked out for and I live in the UK.

CI, again I feel I am entitled to CI. If I pay 29.8% interest on unauthorised borrowing, then so should them. If they had charged 10% for this I would have chased that figure.

Damages..surely anyone's standard of life must be affected if £6000 disappears from their account. Or am I wrong? Am I missing the point when I say that they took a major chunk out of my account over the years, knowingly did so despite what was in the contract? I can see the damages they caused me and if at the end of the day they cost me thousands of pounds in charges, well, then I get on a plane and go to Australia. I'm young, I've got a brain I'll set up a new life. But one thing I am not going to do is lie down to them. But why should that happen when I have done nothing wrong? I didn't steal, nor did I lie, I ran my finances in a dubious matter, but I never stole or lied about it.

I would be happier with getting 12k in charges, made up of 8% interest & damages than the charges and CI. At least they way they are paying me for the standard of life they forced on me.

The damages exist! I have lived with them. Had they only taken the £3 a time they were entitled to then every month/year I would have had more money and I would have paid all my bills on time.

Yes, damages are dangerous, for them. If I ask for £100000 in damages the judge has every right in the world to strike it out. If however I make a valid, well-constructed and logical arguement then it is his duty to investigate that and, as long as I do so, it is then up to the banks to disclose their costs.

Els...totally unruffled. You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold em, know when to walk away, know when to run.

Just another thought. Does anyone know who the CEO for LloydsTSB is?

I take it that I can call witnesses, then why not call him. He will know how much it really costs to return a direct debit.

Thanks for the advice photoman, I do appreciate it.

As usual I will research every bit of advice offered. The way I see it with regards to cost, the worse I could expect would be around £7,500 which I would cover with my actual claim for the fees and 8%. That way I end up back at step 1, but 30 years from now I'll know that I fought for what I believe in and that probably means the most to me. MetallicA teaches you that!

I understand this now moves into an area where not many people can or are willing to advise me on, and I fully accept that. I am pushing the boundries of what has been deemed acceptable. Of course I won't pick my legal reppresentation from the back of a newspaper, that is what google is for, but by day I am a pricing analyst consultant for a major blue chip company, so playing around with numbers, discussing contracts is my bread and butter. Quantifying the precise damages is going to take some work, but I have loads of time and I won't fire my first shot (or raise the pot in poker terms) until I am confident enough in what I have.

Taking it all the way into a court though is new territory for me and I will see how far I can go by myself before I seek legal advice. At this stage I think that I have the capability to go it alone, but I still have loads of time and if I don't feel the vibes then I am not going to go for it.

My odds at getting my fees are 100%

Odds of CI maybe as much as 95%

Damages well, i think its 50%

I don't think I need to convince the judge 100%, as long as I can convince him 60% that could be enough for a win. In fairness though, I don't feel that my arguement is flawed. Maybe rough at the moment, but

still simple. I dispute the damages were caused by the charges (enter the maths bit) and I can plot those numbers across 5 years. If you (the bank) disagree with how I calculated the damages then please inform me what the real costs were. You can not accuratley calculate damages without disclosing costs.

If I lose because I calculated my charges wrong then fair enough, but if that means that they also have to stand in a court of law and publically disclose their charges then I still walk away a winner.

Wise words from Ferris...

"There is no such thing as coincidence, only events in your life that you have taken the time to notice." Meg White, the White Stripes

I saw your sig when I clicked the wrong button as i meant to click the scale.... well it ignited something!

Did you send your letter recorded delivery? Not that it matters. Start court proceedings and once you got a date set write back to them and say that you are disappointed that they did not write back, you take that as their final offer and as there was no attempt at reasonable dialouge you have to go to court. Letters get lost all the time!

Wow, I don't think I have ever had so much honest advice in my life, so thank you all from the very bottom of my heart.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

I don't think I stand alone if I say that these charges have really impacted my life and I really can not help but wonder what if? What if 6 years ago the bank, my fiduciary, the institution that handles the finances of millions of people, had only charged me what they were legally enitled to, or paraphrasing this, what if they did not take what they were not allowed to take? I wonder what it would have been like those months, 5 years ago when I only earned £100 a week, and have £70 of it taken away for a negative balance of £1.19.

I wonder what I would have done with that extra £68.81. I might have taken my granmother for dinner, maybe my folks or my girlfriend. I may have gone and got wasted on a bottle of tequila with good friends, or maybe saved it for the future and one day bought a house. Instead that week I did none. I struggled to get by.

Unfortunately this didn't just happen once in a blue moon, it happened on a regular basis. Direct debits would be returned and I would be piled with more charges to pay, sometimes it would take me 3 months to get even again because they don't just "charge" you once for the pleasure, they do so again and again. An additional £30 for being overdrawn because of the earlier charge and so on and on and on.

Now through out this period I accepted I had to pay that because I had signed a contract that said they would be allowed to reclaim their costs. I mean they were my bank, my fiduciary, I trusted them with all of my wages and yet all the time they were....ahhh I can not say this cause I will once again be edited. They duped me into believing that they were allowed to take that money from me.

How much did it cost them to cover a returned direct debit? To have one machine tell another machine not to transfer funds? Maybe £2 - £3? Surely not £30, and did they know this? Of course they did, they are a big company, they know where every penny comes from, and more importantly where the next penny would come from as well. They knew that the next time their machines declined a transfer they would make £30 from it, and they could probably guess with good accuracy how many times that process would be repeated in the following months. Not just for me, but for millions of other customers to the tune of billions of pounds.

Did they know this was unlawful? Of course they did. Did they tell me? So what do you do when you have such a good profit? You defend it. So they told me and millions of others that they were members of the banking code of practice and that they had a duty of care towards me and that they were a fair institution. But behind the smoke they carried on doing this every time I cost them £2, they charged me £30.

What did they do with that extra £28? They set up insurances, bank assurances, loans, insurance on the loans, invested it in property, the stock market. Car insurance, home, travel, pet, mortgage, ppi insurance. They basically made an awful lot of money from money that they were not allowed to take. They were only allowed to take their costs back.

So where does this all leave me?

Now thankfully to this site I have come to realise that I can actually challenge that process. So claiming my bank charges back is a given. They had no right to take it, I want it back.

I don't just want it back, I also want back interest on that money and unlike the bank I am gonna be fair about this. They said that everytime I took money from them without asking, they would charge me 29.8% interest on it. Hence, i think that as they also took money from me I without my approval I should also be able to charge them 29.8% interest on it as well. After all the law is the same for all.

Now if that process had happened occasionaly I would have left it at this, but in my case it hasn't. This happened month on month, year on year. And the effect of it was a non existant credit record, the inability to borrow money at favourable rates and having to rely on the sub-prime market. I wasn't able to spend the money I had worked hard for on my dreams because they had taken most of it from me. When I bought a car I had to be bled dry on interest, when I made mistakes in my finances they bled me even more.

So do I want damages for it? Yes I do. IfI have to stand in a court of law and argue why I feel so passionate about this then I will do that as well. I will argue the best case that I possibly can and ask back was is rightfully mine. My money and my chance of being in control of my own finances again. I think they owe me this. How much does it all come to? Well I need to sit down and figure it out down to the last penny and I will be fair and accurate about this, but it could range from £21000 to £31000. I haven't made the numbers up, I have quantified each one of them based on what I feel is mine.

Now if this sounds like a bit of a rant its not, it's more of a mission statement. Another Jerry McGuire moment, but I would rather try and fail than not try at all. Of course there needs to be a balance on this, a bit like a good hand of poker, I know what cards I am holding, and I also know what cards the opponent is holding. Now what I need to figure out is how much he is willing to pay to see my cards. If I bet too high he folds, I need to bet just the right amount to tempt him and I will do so in a court of law and I ask that they do the same. Stand in a court of law and show what hand their are really holding, of much does it really cost to return a direct debit?

So thank you all for all the advice that I have received. I truly value each ones opinion and am grateful for the time they have taken in letting me know, when they could so easily have clicked the back button on their explorer.

In view of this i am editing my paragraphs on damages, and will pursue this in my own way. I am going to take the best advice I possibly could and keep my cards close to my chest. I have been brought up to fight for what I believe is right, and I am not gonna lay down now!

Well thanks guys for all of the advice.

As my claims are for 6.5k I am already out of the small claims track. CI interest on top of it is 5.5k so finding myself in a small claims track is not going to happen.

I suppose one thing in my favour is that as i am debating a situation that happened in 2001 this brings me out of the scottish 5 years system and would mean that I could claim through the english system. My T&C states that as my account was opened in a scottish branch I need to go for a scottish court, but this alone would be placing unfair terms on me, thus the English court system should be a viable option.

Some people have raised the issue that I would not be able to claim CI on top of damages. I tend to disagree with this as the bank profited from the charges and as such my arguement from CI remains valid. Well, in my eyes at least.

When it comes to damages I do feel that there are consequential losses incurred by this, and I will be re-reading everyone's post to make double sure of this as I think Glenn mentioned a similar unsuccessfull case.

I agree that the claim may be viewed as vexatious, though I think this would not be the case as long as I can justify my damages. If I ask for 100k in damages sure, but as long as I keep it reasonable and account for such damages in a logical manner then I don't see why not. Simply put if at the time of my defaults the banks had charged me the true costs of the charges I would have had a lot more money available to cover my loans. Lets not forget that the banks are in a very priviledged position as they can take money out of my account at their own discretion.

I work as a pricing analyst so calculating the increased lifetime costs of a loan is not a problem, and my credit record should prove that if I did not have the defaults then I would have been able to borrow money at favourable interest. In my view, the bank, through the charges, caused me to go into default and as the charges are unlawful and they did take the money out of my account without my agreement they should be held responsible for the snowballing effect. For about 3-4 months the charges accounted for 30% of my take home pay. How can anyone justify this?

Tanz, I am sorry to hear that like many you are in a similar situation having to resort to Welcome FInance. As I have kept my payments up to date with them, my credit file is looking better all the time but I still argue that what the bank did was in my view edit and they should be held responsible for their actions. I had £2000 in charges in a year? Do the maths x amount of charges * true cost of charges = true amount. Subtract this from the total charges and that is my extra capital. If that capital coincided with defaults, and the defaults were lower than such amount then there is my proof.

I mean, why should we just lie down and let them walk all over us?

So a bank would be able to disclose their true costs infront of a judge? Great! I would like to be in that room, but then again why should they be able to do so in private. If I am to go to court I would like their costs made public as well.

Thanks newbody, food for thought there.

I am currently at work so i'll try and pick up these points on my lunch break, but as I said food for thought anyway.