Good afternoon all, I was employed as a contractor with a small company. They advanced me my fee in advance of work carried out and then cancelled the contract and asked me to pay back the advance. I had already used the money for urgent matters but undertook to repay them asap. They gave me a piece of paper with a date to pay back by which I agreed to as at the time I felt this would be enough time. Unfortunately things did not improve for me and despite my communicated intention to pay the debt back they have not accepted my situation and are going to take action to retrieve the money. Unfortunately I am currently of no fixed abode and staying with friends. I cannot give the address as this is obviously not my registered address . They are now threatening to send legal papers to the net of kin I gave on my initial contract. I have given my undertaking to pay back and have been in conversation on email but they are using this as leverage to get me to pay. Are they able to do this legally or can I advise them that this is not acceptable? Thanks very much in advance GIB

Only for £80 which is nothing compared to some on this forum, but just wanted to share my personal *win* with knowledge and foresight provided by this site For some time i had a Citi/Opus credit card and kept it in a manageable level. At around May 2012 I left my family home at the start of a very bitter divorce proceedings. The details are unimportant other than at the same time to this I thought I had paid off the Credit Card completely and even destroyed it. Unfortunately due to the bitter divorce, letters that Opus had been sending me were not passed on (destroyed?) by my wife. My first hint of a problem was that I received a letter from Lowell informing me that I now owned them over £80. I immediately asked them for details , not a formal Prove it letter as I wanted to seem a bit naive . This resulted in a copy of statements from Opus going back to about October 2012. The problem was that every statement consisted only of late payments and interest adding up to about £50 of the £80 demanded. Not a single mention of the original debt There then followed many rounds of politely asking for statements going back to the original debt, with a response of either 'pay us' letters, copies of the part statements or even the original agreement at one point ( even though I hadn't even asked for it) This came to a head when they managed to find my telephone number and called. They made the mistake of saying that if I wanted the original debt statement that it would be my responsibility to to submit a SAR to Opus and 'its not their problem' I then sent them a heavy hitting letter, pointing out their statuary responsibilities, their onus of proof, revoking any contact by telephone etc and refusing to respond any further unless they provided either original debt proof, or started court action. They caved immediately and i received a No Further Action in the post today And that original debt? I still don't have the faintest clue what it was for. But extrapolating back it must have been for less than £5 Thats a 1600% overcharge fail for Opus/Lowell in the bag