I have recently had a successful ppi claim against welcome finance which is for 2 seperate loans from approx 2001-2005. The letter I have received says the amount to be settled is for approx £2700 but because of the money I still owe £1100 they will only be paying £1600 and if I wish to accept this the offer will be available until approx Oct 25th 2012.
I remember having a conversation with a Welcome staff member 6/7 yrs ago when I was sure that all the payments had been made but she said there was still 1 monthly payment due of £155. As I did not wish to have problems and after all the money we had already paid I agreed to pay one last payment of £155 so that everything then would be finally settled. I instructed the staff member to take the final payment on the 1st of the month(payday) from my debit card but she told me that she would have to contact me on the day to do this which I agreed to. This is the last I ever heard from Welcome Finance. No phone calls, no letters(despite continuing to live at the same address for a further 3 yrs, nothing.
I contacted the number on the settlement letter to explain this and was given another number to call as they only went on the information that was given to them. When contacting this number and giving account details etc they could not find any details. When I then explained the problem and why I was calling the 'debt' details were suddenly found and I was told that much of the outstanding £1000+ was made up of interest and fees but all this was frozen when passed on to a debt recovery company.
They could not give me any breakdown of how the £1000+ debt was made up or the details of the debt recovery company or offer ANY explanation as to why NOBODY had attempted to contact me in the intervening 6 yrs and the first time I knew of the 'amount owing' was after making a valid £2700 claim for misold ppi.
I am of the opinion that the general belief held would be that anybody who is desperate enough to take a loan from Welcome would be desperate for any payout of £1000+ so would rather accept owing a £1000 so they could get the other £1600. In many ways they are correct and we do really need the money ASAP but it makes me sick to think we are losing over a £1000 that we simply do not owe.
Can anybody tell me, firstly can they legally put a time limit on how long we have to accept the offer of settlement and secondly should I just send the matter to the onmbudsman outlining all facts and let them settle this? I am just worried that this will only prolong things further as the other thing I have not mentioned is when we sent the claim in initially, after several weeks of not getting any response, we then phoned and asked for a progress report only to be informed they had received no claim from us!! We made sure the next claim was sent recorded delivery!!
