Ever found
yourself at the bottom of a Lancashire quarry in the rain to
collect a JCB, only to discover no one is qualified to move it?
Perhaps you’ve turned up at a
construction site to collect scaffolding, only to find five other
lessors there to do the same – and no way to tell what’s yours and
what’s not.
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Whatever your Collection Nightmare
we at Leasing Life are looking for the worst repossession tales
from the UK and Europe for this very diary page, so get in touch if
you have a horror story worth sharing or perhaps a leasing myth
you’ve heard.
We look forward to sharing your
woes.
Shakespeare once asked what’s in a
name but, as Jeremy Hall, director of
broker West Won discovered, when it comes to leasing, the
answer is a lot.
“We took title to a telephone
system on the 1st of October last year that had come to the end of
the original lease period.
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By GlobalData“We wrote to the customer at their
home address asking if they would like to buy it. They sent back
our letter and a handwritten letter denying knowledge of us or the
original finance company they did the lease with.
“We then sent a copy of the lease
agreement and over the coming months called him numerous times and
even spoke to his wife. In November we wrote another letter setting
out his options.”
In January this year Jeremy
received another handwritten letter, which this time stated the
person in question did not live at that address. The problem was,
although signed in a different name, the handwriting was identical
to the previous letter signed by the debtor. Thus was born the case
of Mr Non-Existent.
What followed was months of amateur
sleuthing and solicitors’ letters during which Mr Non-Existent’s
neighbours and a cohabitant acknowledged he lived at the address on
file and the man himself (under his new name) sent a letter to
Jeremy demanding damages for harassment – again in the same
handwriting.
“Have we got it wrong?’ I asked
myself,” said Jeremy. “Has someone else committed a fraud, paid the
lease and used his name?”
After double checking the original
lease agreement and matching the authorised signature with the
letters, Jeremy knew he was right and sent the man an invoice every
single week demanding the money while they tried to recover the
funds.
In the end, it was discovered there
had been a clerical error at the original bank that lent the money
to Mr Non-Existent. He may not have been liable.
Unfortunately, rather than try to
get this confirmed he chose to pretend he didn’t exist.
“The moral here is that things are
not as simple as they seem,” said Jeremy. “If he had just responded
to our letter in October like any normal person would have done, he
would have saved everyone a lot of time and money.”
For the full story read Jeremy’s
account at www.jeremyhall.co.uk
Got a Collection
Nightmare? Contact: grant.collinson@vrlfinancialnews.com
