Financial Disaster





I may have to rewrite parts of this, I was literally shaking
with anger at times during the writing of it.
This catalogues 14 months of hell, within which fifteen separate
errors were made, some very serious, all totally avoidable.
They simply do not give a single damn about their customers,
and have no intention whatsoever of making any tangible
monetary remuneration for their errors, which result in
masses of time, effort, and lost revenue, solely down to
their faults, yet which they expect all their customers to
put up with in silence and unpaid for their trouble.


I predict, though this may sound inconceivable now,
that in five years time, at least half of the high street
big players will have ceased to exist.
Those lending institutions who seem so very smug and complacent
now fleecing their customers for all they are worth, and nine
times more, may wail and beg all too soon for bailing out in turn,
for their greed, irresponsible lending, and inhuman customer miscare.


malcolm pugh 2006



Live news at top here ongoing.
Letter to chairman starts at Original Letter.
Latest December 22cnd 2005
The Ombudsman is taking on my case and has written to them for a final decision
to reach them no later than eight weeks from now, I presume late February.
The Ombudsman lady has been scrupulously efficient and helpful, plus their form
is freely downloadable from their web site for anyone to do.

Latest at 13 may 05.
New and final letter sent to chairman complaining of whitewash
by their internal investigation, putting a senior financier to assess
computer problems. If this fails will go through courts.

Sent all of this and Experion page to Watchdog and
Times money on 16th March.

1. Acknowledgement received 1st March, posted 28th Feb. 11 days lapse time.
Being dealt with by Customer Care, Colmore Row, NOT Chairman, deemed
impractical to personally deal with all handwritten greivances.
Promised in depth research and reply within ten days, i.e. by 11th March.
Duly arrived on 11th March agreeing apologies well in order but trying
to maintain there were no errors extant.






I sent the email below and have had written confirmation of receipt and
tentative deadline of ten days to collate all new data. This gentleman
at least seems to know what he is doing, which is why now I provided further
more detailed data, plus a clearer explanation of the problem.

Current Email undergoing investigation is below. March 15th 2005.
Dear Mr xxxxxx, thank you for giving your reply. As you agree, I have been let down by my moneylenders and apologies were necessary.
I thank you for doing so, many others have not.

There are salient details I fear that I may have explained badly in the first instance, to whit the direct debits were not set up on a. my credit card with them, circa 12 03 as per start date on card.
b. my partners credit card, circa 07 04 as per start date on card
c. Texaco credit card circa 03 04 as per start date on card. The loan of 13000 I got on February 23 2004 was applied for first on the 23 January 2004 and rejected due to bad flag on Experion placed there in December January by them due to direct debit not having been set up. Hence it was a month delayed. I appreciate you have written down the Dixons etc, but these were paid, the residual was for shares. Whilst not specified in writing it was inferred during negotiation. Thus I lost January to February. Some 4p to 7p.

Whilst my partners details may be subject to data protection, we are inextricably linked at Experion and Equifax due to having once had a joint loan at HFC. Thus what happens to one impinges a lot on the other. So when her card direct debit was not set up, her October loan was compromised in exactly the same way, and as my dealings were frozen at that time both of us were effectively cut off from any finance whatsoever and have been ever since.

The Texaco card was set up in 04, underwritten by guess who. This took an age to find out it was really them and not Texaco at all. Notwithstanding that they were clearly notified, even though the flag had been extant and erroneous since August and September 2004. I set up my card in March 2004, and given the probs with them in January paid for the first month March by electronic transfer, at which time a debit was there. Your own common sense will tell you it must have been present. If paid electronically March May and July, it stands to reason it got paid by direct debit in april june, else the ever trigger happy bad flags would have appeared on Experion and Equifax. So I presume the direct debit malfunctioned in August, and has never worked since, but as I pay by electronic transfer often very AHEAD of schedule, to be on the safe side, then August bad flag was not to be expected and certainly very erroneous.

Even given that, consider this statement by law. You are allowed 28 days by law to remove bad flags from instance date of first contact. That first contact in Texacos case is 11 January 2005. In writing on a letter. It was removed after virtually daily prompting by both myself and Keith Boden at contact us on the 17 February 2005. That is 37 days in anyones money. Over 28 days is fraud, defamation of character and restraint of trade. Ill go to ombudsman and court on that alone, having it in black and white, clear cut failure to remove flag known to be in error for 37 days. End of story.

If you check out the other two instances on my credit card dec 03 and partners august 05 you would find 31 days and 29 days respectively also. Both illegal to boot.
I would hold these in reserve and go to court on Texaco alone to start with.

I appreciate your obviously sincere apologies, rare these days, but there comes a time when they dont pay the bills.

As per there being no Trip over perhaps the online IT team will shed more light on this. Every customer online has a little flag set from 0 to 10. The nearer to 0 you are the better risk you are. This gets reassessed by the god computer run once a month, usually the third working week of the month, at which time aforementioned flag is reassessed. If you are 0 to 3 rating you get offered your loan at up to 84 months online at preferential rates. If over 3 you get 60 months at higher rate. This also governs what rate and duration you are offered in branch at the same time.
thus a direct debit not getting set up does seriously affect your rating online as internally you constitute a failed payee on credit card and externally you have been flagged on Experion and Equifax as bad news, incidentally blocking any credit from any other source and blackening your character erroneously, a double whammy, the computer rolls over third week of month and the rating flag is set above 3. no 84 months offered, no preferential rates, you get offered to refinance your 13000 loan at 5.9 per cent over 7 years replaced with your 13000 loan at 10.9 per cent over 5. you can see this can be some bit of a problem for minnows like me.
You touched on my recovering from alcoholism. This made me HAVE to reinvent myself via credit and my wits, I always worked, and still do, on cash where possible. All my debts are covered when I die by two insurance policies via them which would also pay my partners loan off dead too and leave about 10000 over even now, for even if the one policy were not activated via non accidental death. I also have not frittered my loans on holidays, cars, or down the drain. I have bought sensible things which are appreciating but are hard to liquidize suddenly in events like now. I tell you this because Mr Boden speaks highly of you and I think highly of Mr Boden. I am the creature of trust and honesty, which is perhaps why I get annoyed at unprofessional errors more than most.
You see there are set dates at which loans can occur, due to computer generated ratings which govern the rate duration amount. This once set is irrevocable for another whole month, even if flags are removed internally and externally the next day. I want you to check this out as being fact for your own peace of mind.
Not even a senior manager can override this. So should you find that you are bad flagged, unless you remove it before the third weekend of a month you have to wait another WHOLE MONTH for the computer set ratings flag to reset. This was my business, I know this to be true, but please do check. Orally also there is a grim insistence by the moneylender, indeed all moneylenders, to check every last miniscule detail is right. To me, as an ex professional systems programmer in finance most of my life, it is exceedingly poor if customers have to cross check every last t and dot every last I because their branch fails in its duty to do so, and in not setting up simple things like direct debits, sets in train a whole lot more serious can of worms. The longer this goes on, and the more effort I have to put into getting justice out of this the more determined I will become to see it all through to the death. I dont quit.
You may see me as endemic of the current malaise of high debt and sod the consequences sweeping the country, this could not be further from the truth, I am trying to reinvent my finances to eradicate the loans taken out in the first place within 5 years, not the 7 stipulated as return span for said loans. Everything I do now is geared to turning in a profit to whittle them down. I hope that I have presented my case with more clarity and less sheer anger. The Texaco failure is 37 days against 28 allowed. That constitutes fraud.
I thank you for all your professionalism and humanity, sadly lacking elsewhere. yours sincerely,
Malcolm pugh.
End of email acknowledged on 15th march 2005.

Reply from them below, dated fri march 25th


This, sadly, does not come close to addressing the painstakingly laid out detailed descriptions of tripovers and rollovers on the computer side, governing duration, rate and amount allowed, and impinged on in both our cases due to internal errors. They put a non computer man in charge of this computer orientated review internally, to assess any case I might have against them. These are top financiers efforts to respond back to a computer systems problem. That is the reason why his name was omitted as I feel he did what he thought was right from his viewpoint, and was the only official deadline keeper there in thirteen months to come back to me when he promised, on time. A pity these top financiers are not still running the show instead of the total obeisance bowing to computers. Look where that got Barclays at Easter 2005 and the year before, but of course they are not paying out any money for their blatant errors either.

I have now to go onward to court thanks to them effectively washing their hands of any responsibility whatsoever in this matter, the last thing I need at present and profoundly depressing and never ending. But I will surely do it as now I am not letting them get away with even a halfpenny worth of this, not least for others who may follow me with less computer awareness or financial knowledge.

I was a systems programmer for nigh on 30 years, and ran 3is operation technically for about 8 years, some with Geac some with 3i, so I know a little something about this sphere. Don Aslett ran 3is financial department, whom I had the greatest respect for, and who would be apoplectic at ONE of these errors occurring, whereas there are something like ten or so in one year, in actual fact I have never changed anything or taken out anything new in one year which actually worked. Scary.
And that is one of our most profitable institutions, who cant even set up direct debits, cant process life assurance without farming it out, and cant process shares on time, and in the meantime screw up your Experion and Equifax files as an unseen plus unknown aside.

It seems the only thing they are very good at is getting your money in and hanging on to it for as long now as possible. That is very efficient and incurs interest and fines if not adhered to the minute, yet they are totally blasé and untouchable when it comes to paying money out or processing things quickly, efficiently and without error. When such errors occur there are no fines and no interest and no culpability.

Additionally, I had to sell shares, through them, I wanted to hold on to
as I am sure they will continue to rise, in British energy, sold at 2.90.
The first sale of straight shares took 12 days until the money hit my funds,
all internal to them. Second involved changing a warrant to shares and selling, which started on the 10th feb and finished today, appropriately the first of April. The mere matter of 50 days. They had 1,946 of my money to pay the warrant on 23rd feb and held it for 37 days until I got my share money.
Remember, I have been a customer for 26 years and all mine and my partners retailing, insurance, finance and share dealings were done by them exclusively.
Also, the dire lateness and laxness were despite urgings and help internally from their own powerful internal affairs department. To do this badly, even under internal duress is at best poor, at worst fraud.
Their own limit on share dealings is 30 days, as I was quoted, in the fine print.
The legal time to remove bad flags from Experion is 28 days.
They had three goes at bad flags, taking 31, 29 and 37 days respectively,
and the share deal took 50 days, judge for yourself.


Original letter.

February 17th 2005 Malcolm Pugh.



Dear Chairman,

Please do not take this personally, or construe this
as any form of coercion, all I want now is justice
for myself, as their customer. That should still mean
something even in this day and age. Below are couple of little snippets of minor rage
existing on my website even as we speak, a sort of flavour
for my missive. I have written to you before, and know
you to be a fair plus equable man of the old school of
where a handshake is a contract, so am I.

Preamble, flavour on website as is.

In view of my recent experiences with large amorphous high street institutions and
unwieldy follow up to mass generated card take up and loan processing,
giving resultant bad credit flags on Experion and Equifax, the following info
seems even more relevant than when I first wrote it last year.
Malcolm Feb. 13 2005.

I hope this page has helped you all in your hour of need so to speak,
as I think the traditional high street branches are taking their customers for granted
and milking them for all they are worth, and making billions of pounds
profit in the process. Aside from exorbitant practices listed above, I am
lost for words on the sheer incompetence of my long term moneylender I have been
with for over 26 years. They cant set up direct debits, they cant be trusted not to
put bad flags on Equifax and Experion willy nilly for no cause excepting ineptitude,
they cannot cash shares in without it taking over ten days.
I bought shares at 7p instead of 4p to start with, due to a direct debit not
being set up and their computer wrongly flagging me, hence I had to wait for the
finance to buy the shares, and lost out on 3 p on buying. Then badly flagged me
twice more, necessitating me to sell these shares far earlier than I would have liked,
then, after all this, they did not get the share sale money into the funds for ten days, though
it was their own share sales to their own branch.

How can you possibly try to work like that, god alone knows how big firms have to
manage and operate with incompetents like these as their backers, I am
having my work cut out on far more flexible deadlines.

End preamble.

You get the picture, remark no mention is made, even in anger, of them.
I have after all held my savings book for nearly thirty years and loyalty dies
hard with me, evidenced by mine and my partners choice.
We have also currently got a joint venture, a loan each, a credit card each, two life assurances,
car insurance, select book status, sentinel card protection etc.
we have all our eggs with you, we even deal shares through you.
And what have we had back from you in the last year since February. Let me advise you.

My loan refreshes as it were every Feb 20th my partners every 27th October, we never miss payments on cards or loans, as in not ever anywhere.

I had my credit card set up by you, and filled in a direct debit form and sent it off in December 2003. My loan should have happily tripped over on its monthly rollover to a 7 year option upon 20th, the third weekend in January, bearing in mind my sole purpose was to buy shares in British Energy, some 3500 pounds
worth. The loan fails to trip, giving another months wait. The reason. You had not set up the direct debit, and this had wrongly flagged up internally and also externally at Experion and Equifax, you dont get told it just happens in seconds and takes weeks of hassle to sort out. That is copiously documented internally to you incidentally. Fair enough we all make mistakes. But it cost me buying the shares at 7.0 p not 4.0p so I got 50000 instead of 87500. we will come back to these figures. At this point I was doing patient mode.

Also at this point I repaid a joint loan to HFC Trust now Household early, out of your loan money to have all in house to you, a kind of loyalty, showing willing, thing, and both I and my partner got erroneously flagged on Experion jointly, by HFC, not known then as you are not informed, insidiously.

Come the summer we take out a credit card in my partners name on the joint one. Send off the Direct Debit form. You guessed it, September they flag Experion and Equifax up because they have messed up the direct debit for hers as well. Not quite as patient here. I write from February 2005, this was going for my partners tripped over loan in October. Blown out of the water again by you, and also by HFC who came to light on search. Still no loan to this day.
HFC kept up this travesty and incidentally breached the 28 day allowance on Experion and Equifax by some margin. That constitutes Fraud, defamation of character and restraint of trade according to Citizens Advice. Suffice to say HFC just paid me 500 pounds and wrote to everyone and his dog saying sorry.
At the first instance HFC physically faxed through a letter, which being retained, in your Managers presence a month on in November stating the Experion and Equifax files were WRONG. No matter, your computer has no override and the letter is meaningless. Yet I am solvent as is my partner, yet nothing can be done now because of your computer system. That is tantamount to saying we are insolvent and untrustworthy when we patently always were not and had the documentation to prove it. Also notwithstanding that in abeyance of HFC there was another erroneous flag internally and also Externally at Experion and Equifax from yourselves, unbelievably caused by yet another direct debit failure on set up by the same department that messed it up the February before. Talk about learning from mistakes.

Would you like this kind of pressure. I was a systems programmer for over 20 years and tough mentally, this was getting well fraying. But it gets better still, as if in an attempt to send me mad. Eventually, thanks yet again to the only man I trust at yours, Keith Boden of Contact US online, it gets sorted out internally and externally at Experion and Equifax. So now it is December, HFC and your direct debit flags are gone. Surely a loan no probs. But no, there is a create card error flag set by yourselves on Experion. You might well be laughing by now, maybe in time maybe I will. Do you know how hard it is to be patient and polite when you are going ballistic inside. Well be assured I do now.
It turns out to be you underwriting Texaco, who set off an error flag for no discernable reason whatsoever. No blips, money on time from me via your direct debit to you in the guise of Texaco, yet a flag suddenly appears on Experion and Equifax. Can you really believe so much incompetence can strike at one couple. Believe me it has, and if you dont there are blow by repeated blow emails in your own archives to prove it plus obviously I, as an ex systems programmer, take copious backups, Im even backing this up as I go along, and keep all emails, correspondence, statements. I am meticulous, as is your CONTACT US department without whom I would surely have crucified someone.

Take it as read that is for real.

Given this I have had to sell my British Energy Shares way early, to literally avoid destitution, see my details by all means if you need proof how close I was and still am to going under. Selling these shares took ten days for the money to hit our files, this Wednesday 16th Feb. Via who you might ask, why via you, that firm we have put all our faith and all our money.

I give you a flavour, the taste of what it is like, to be at the customer end in
this. Having sent emails to your underwriters in this last fiasco plainly and strongly informing them so early as 11th January that I faced destitution, backed up by your own internal Contact department stressing the urgency,
I get a letter on the 3rd FEBRUARY stating they dont know why it missed the January rollover, another lost loan month, but it would be sorted 72 hours tops. 6 days later I get a letter promising 5 days lapse time. 6 days later they update Equifax and not Experion. after some strong words by email from me and others it gets sorted well quick overnight. Throughout it was mentioned that as the initial contact was 11th January, the last date to remove this would be by law the 8th Feb. it got sorted after horrendous arm wrestling on the 17th today, of Feb that is, a full 37 days and in breach of law, like HFC. As in fraud, defamation of character, restraint of trade.

Now picture how I felt here. I give you this analogy. You as chairman have had eleven solid months of grief with eleven different problems, all generated by you, but thankfully you have been wise and bought up British energy and Waterford shares and had the brass guts to hang on to them throughout even all this mayhem. You however are teetering on the brink of disaster, but your trusty department at Texaco can save the day, you are Chairman, you send them an email saying, I am near destitution, we all are, but if you just get this sorted for Friday 18th we will be ok, but be known that is desperate, dire straits here if we fail.
What would you think if you got an email like this back to calm your nerves, steady your shaking hand.
Dear Mr Pugh,
We have advised Experian to update the credit file as instructed by
XXXXXXXXXXXX. That is normally done within 5 days and then updated by Experian on a monthly basis. The update should be shown on the next credit file report. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us
Real concern there. As in, it might work, if it doesnt, maybe it probably will next month or sometime.

I of course was the model of restraint, well not quite. It got done.

Would you be well happy with all this litany of disaster.
Ive been off drink for 5 years, ciggies for 4, painkillers for 3.
This has not helped these cravings one bit though im still
in control, just, of my mind.

Why the hell should I put up with this.

Your computer rolls over tomorrow night 18th. I go again to Sutton Coldfield branch Monday morning to see the totally estimable Gillian Rudrum, a bright light in a dark firm. 0121 323 3183

that is precisely what I would like you to do before then. Either

a. Recompense me for all the lost share revenue and incidentals, plus the estimated double price I would have got from the shares by holding them until after the forthcoming recession. Plus a reasonable lump for unreal and unrelenting stress. I suggest wiping my loan and credit card, and allowing my partners loan to regenerate at 20000 over 7 years at 5.9 per cent. I feel this to be fair.

b. failing that Pay so much down as compensation, I suggest 10000, plus 50 pounds for every hour I have to spend on this until my partners loan is ratified, bearing in mind that I spend around ten hours per week and premium line calls for all of this farce and have been doing for pretty well exactly a year to date and rising.
Also that were I working my contract rate is around 200 an hour in todays money, not 50.
My local trusted finance house has said it will supply a greivance line and administer my Experion and Equifax files relating to your payment to me, weekly. Hopefully no errors will crop up at Experion. Hopefully no ccjs would accrue also against your head office. Errors happen all too often these days to innocent parties but can quickly be fixed.
Any rectification would of course have to be channeled through my greivance line via menus to the hold system on a premium rate line, this can take time and be somewhat wearing, but one has no alternative.

c. If, assuming the two above are not to your liking, then you might like to consider going to court with all the attendant publicity, bearing in mind the compensation for putting an ex alcoholic since recovered, under undue and unrelenting pressure for over a year might well look like a hammer trying to crack an egg, obvious implications there for compensation in our crazy compensation culture. I will happily go there if you like, bearing in mind that I have copious irrefutable evidence to back all of this up, and can even call on the recent freedom of information act to subpoena your emails of said same, and in any event it could scarcely be more mindblowingly stressful than dealing with you on a day to stressful day basis.

d. Failing all this there now is this document which constitutes a web page as yet unreleased, private. It is not linked to my website whatsoever.
It doesnt read too well as your promotion poster though.

I have faith in you as regards previous contact that you will be fair and equable plump for a.
I can live with that, it seems fair. b is poetic justice option, c is unworkable for you and I am very persistent anyway, reference HFC who thought I would quietly go away if ignored for long enough. I dont go away when I am annoyed past distraction, I get like Walker in the old time film point blank.

d. would cost you a mountain more than any of the others, I get over 1000
visitors per day and rising rapidly, plus a lot of journalists liaise with the bears,
I doubt youd want to go there, down that avenue.

There it is, there are only four options to choose from, no alternatives, and I have only got to this point through sheer exasperation. Remember I could still go to the wall, I have little recourse but you having put both our trusts in you, thats our track record, which should of course be unblemished.
Patently it is not, parlously so and remains so.

In any event I am not vindictive, I just want to be treated fairly.

I went to the Halifax today and they would help if they could but my credit cards are all near their limit. Now why would that be. Maybe it is because ive had to squeak by on the skin of my teeth taking cash advances, with credit cards tripping over from zero per cent to full, when we should have had the cut and dried loan in OCTOBER 2004 which would have paid them all off.

So yet again your Samson strikes his blow against the little man.
I dont think you realize just how much you are taking your customer base for granted and fleecing them with charges, yet giving poorer and ever poorer service. This in the face of online professional competition with less overheads and more compassion that comes with needing customers rather than bleeding customers.

Through all this bear in mind that I have struggled to be reasonable at all times, even under undue and unwarranted pressure for an unrelenting plus dismally depressing year. All down to your branch. I have at all times been courteous and polite, even when incandescently annoyed. Your own staff everywhere will attest this, I have kept my cool and retained my level head throughout unparalleled provocation and unprecedented callousness and disdain, re that email. My partner has suffered a lot unnecessarily due to me being simmeringly angry with this whole stupid endless debacle.

I set up Citibanks systems for Geac, Highland Lasing, and Hamilton Leasing, Consumer Association. I set up and ran 3i for 8 years, writing their investment ledger, nominal, purchase, treasury. I wrote their BACS system from scratch, their maturity analysis from scratch working with Don Aslett in his role as Head Financier to me as Senior systems programmer.

I am now into my website. And indexing. As seen in Google, Yahoo, Altavista, Alltheweb, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves etc.

Think about 200 indices including top 20. Then throw in new MSN,
Google images and Yahoo images.

Try ANY of these with

lowest long term personal loans

The bears, as in my bears the stiffsteiffs, come no 1
on ALL indexes everywhere, dont they.



So you see, I havnt lost my touch, many would pay much for these skills.
However I am now into helping people not making money, and am not all that well.
You are making life much more difficult than it needs to be for me.


I am also in touch with several people I worked with from way back, guru standard, much better than me and my own iq at 161.
They too have a web presence.

I appeal to your sense of honour. I dont want to be bothered with any of the usual, Mr. Smith has been delegated to deal with you stuff.
I want YOU to see that I am right here, and make that fair decision yourself,
as in any event you are probably one of the few at your place capable of so doing.

I would be happy with a. it relieves stress, no loss of face on either side, and saves me any further hassle. I would let it go for a.

Be assured I will be totally driven and unrelenting otherwise, I am very
annoyed over all this, not least with some of the patronizing and throwaway
emails I have had, treating a complaint like a nuisance, like you are some leper
to be bothering them. If things worked, and lets face it this are basic stupid errors, some actually repeated some months on, you would have no need
of complaint. I think the CONTACT US department at first thought I must be gilding the lily, as admittedly it seems almost impossible for so few to make so many mistakes in such a short time to one person. Yet I gradually detected an almost imperceptible wave of help emerging after my greivances were all, one after another, endlessly after another, again after another, found to be 100 per cent accurate.

It would be nice if we are also both granted some grading level where these Experion Equifax type errors cannot happen or at the very least we are properly notified if they do. Why is it no one gets told, oh by the way we have bad flagged you on Experion and Equifax.

What if even YOU were wrongly flagged up on Experion, or bought a house with an unknown ccj on it. Even YOU as Chairman of them would have to wait it out, you wouldnt have the interminable hassle and phone calls at premium to menus, then on hold, then cut off, but youd still have to wait in line for clearance, and god forbid you were hoping for a company loan, the computer would tell even YOU to go away. Your computer is becoming the tail wagging the dog, and prone to power cuts predicted more and ever more frequent.

Bear in mind, no one said anything approaching sorry in the now included email, there are many more such impersonal dismissals in the same vein, archived.

Tomorrow read this again, imagine it is you way back in February 2004.

You have just beaten alcohol, cigarettes, and painkillers.

You are then subjected to a whole year of unremitting, constant attrition and energy sapping worry purely down to gross incompetence, losing you buckets of money, time, and sanity leading inexorably towards destitution, knowing many would love you to go destitute just to say, I told you hed never cut it.

Be truly impartial, and really ask yourself, if it were you involved personally.

Would you sit back,
and take all of this,
and say nothing.



Addendae.

Obviously, since I sent this letter recorded delivery Feb 17th, in hindsight now I have thought of
other things I should have said, but did not at the time, though I prepared the letter quite well.

1. Were I not honourable myself, I could achieve the status of no loan, and no credit card, by
the simple expedient of declaring myself insolvent. This was actually suggested to me
in advice from Citizens Advice, as one means of resolving the stress I was under.

2. In actual fact, there have been three separate well documented occasions where they were
informed flags were erroneous, where they took more than 28 days to remove them.
Being 31 days, plus 29 Days, and 37 Days respectively. These all constitute Fraud, Defamation
of character and restraint of trade by law apparently, as you get 28 days leave to remove only.

a. Texaco read their letter below, clearly stating jan 11th start date.



72 hours plus the third equals the sixth of feb to me, but no, here is their next response.

b. letter of 9th feb as an email from texaco aka them.

Dear Mr Pugh, Thank you for the email. I can confirm that having spoken with Stephen xxxxxxx in our Glasgow office that we are currently in the process of updating your credit report with Equifax. This process can take up to 5 working days and will only ever appear on the Equifax report once that is updated by Equifax. I understand that credit reports are printed monthly and that the file amendment will be shown on next months report. If you would like to discuss this matter further, please call Stephen on 0141 204 9007 after 11.30am and he will be happy to speak with you at length. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us via e mail at customerservice texacocard.co or call Customer Service on 0800 587 5783 8am to 8pm Monday through Friday and 9am to 5pm Saturday. Kind Regards, Mark Horner c. letter on 10th from texaco clone.



This was complete and utter rubbish. Fortunately I checked this out and did not assume it done.

NOTE. Texaco clone actually fixed this on the 17th.
not on the 3rd, 9th 10th or before, but the 17th feb.
Started on 11th jan.

Clear cut above in writing.

Do these letters and emails seem a little condescending and patronising,
let alone inaccurate, ill informed, and treating the public who receive them as
stupid beyond reason to you.

3. Problem I had with Barclaycard, where their error flags are still on Experion as they stubbornly
refuse to remove them, was caused by the online drop down list supplying the wrong
roll number to pay Barclaycard online, resulting in two months where though I sent the
money on time, it went into the ether, subsequently returning some five weeks later and
two missed payments. They supplied wrong roll number, Barclaycard refused
point blank to remove them. Flags are still on there, seven months old.

4. Kays catalogue flagged me up just before December as I had paid them in full early,
yet it arrived one day late. Medium was the electronic online transfer, and time
taken was TWELVE days.

5. Each instance of direct debits not being set up involved charges for late payments
to be applied to our credit cards in the fist two instances, which also had to be laboriously
removed.

6. You might consider todays ongoing debacle. Yours of course. I hear you groan.

I sold my shares in British energy, which took an age. I had warrants as well to buy 1946 shares at fixed
98p. I bought these, by sending cheque and warrant on 10th feb recorded delivery.
Received 11th feb their end, confirmed.

The cheque cashed 23rd. So took 13 days to cash cheque. Now youd think id then get a share
certificate so I could sell the things wouldnt you. As they have had my money some 6 days now,
and had cheque on 11th, 19 days ago. So I rang today. No probs Mr Pugh.
But miss, it is a prob, I want to sell them before I go truly insolvent, and note I havnt even
got the certificate yet, and when I have, then it takes you ten days to process.
No it doesnt.
Well last time it did.
Oh yes, so it did. Anyway Mr Pugh, it can take up to 30 days turnaround on
the warrant, its in the small print. So it might get to you by the 11th.

In point of fact I got the certificate on the 21st. 38 days after they got my warrant, and
26 days after they had close to 2000 pounds off me. I still have to wait about ten days to receive any
money, by which time that is 36 days since they had my money and 48 since they had warrant.

Bottom line here is Im selling shares to boost funds before it all goes broke, started on 10th
Feb when I got warrant, and it seems this will miss the MARCH rollover for the loan, where
it would have been nice to actually be in credit when it rolls over. Feb 10th to probable March 21st
to buy shares from warrant and cash them. I cant get them to hang on to the
certificate and not bother sending it me, to just send it back, either.
Im genuinely tempted to go insolvent anyway, then I wouldnt have a loan or a credit card period.
Plus I have no further need of credit either way as all Ive ever been trying to do is batten down
before the storm of recession. Rates are going to rise again too.
Loan we had in my name last February was higher interest because a month was lost due to direct debit fault.

This also exposes the strange practice, at least there, of your standing only being reassessed
by computer every four weeks or so. It does not reflect your current daily situation, any more than
do the much vaunted credit search files they use in tandem with their own data, or in many cases
to exclusion of their own data, see Times Online Money March 2nd Alison Coles.
So you can be perfectly viable yet have to wait up to a month for a loan, plus that only if the
credit files are right, which believe me is quite often not the case. Insidiously here
it is YOUR responsibility to check your credit files, your responsibility to make sure all
your residency and retailing plus credit card info is up to date, and your responsibility to get
it all changed if it is in error. Oh, and no one ever tells you if a ccj or bad flag has been placed
on your file, often totally in error, you have to find out yourself. Even if a ccj is erroneous to start with,
you have to get it satisfied, pay 10 pounds to the court for doing so, then it stays on there for
SIX YEARS. Why arent funds and credit files updated daily, your overdraft is. Why arent you
told by law when someone bad flags or ccjs, you wander along blissfully unaware of disaster.
Equifax allowed one bad flag month on a debt that was SATISFIED two months earlier, when
pulled on this they said I had to get on to the firm in question. More time and money.

7. What is not really mentioned well above is the sheer time effort and money spent
trying to rectify things that are errors, beyond your control, and unnecessary. Yet they
take up eons of your time kept hanging on premium rate lines and being shuffled
from one number to another, one department to another, often then even
resulting in no action being taken and having to do the same procedure over and
ever over and ever over again, when it should take ONE call. What galls me is that the culprit firm
is making money out of you hand over fist when you are complaining.
You can see where the guy in Network was coming from when he had
everyone hanging out of their windows shouting
We are mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more.

All these institutions will give you immensely strict deadlines and draconian penalties
to get money in, yet seem blasé in the extreme about rectifying your errors or
moving your money out. I was a systems programmer at the top financial
places like 3i, so fail to see an electronic transfer need be any more than overnight
at the very worst in this day and age, say two overnights if both institutions involved
use overnight updates via large mainframes.

So where does 12 days sit in that scenario, and as it is computer to local computer,
why are we quoted working days, as we get made overdrawn and debited
over weekends quite happily. To computers all days are equal.

Perhaps in dealings with these we should be told, some are more equal than others.

Further Link to Ombudsman level below.

These people and the Ombudsman


teddy bears home page


Ragegiftcrochomebeardetsemail

Jagstrainssteiffs