Received scary letters from Link Financial / Kearns claiming I owe thousands of pounds!!!

[Alphabet40]

Hello,

To my knowledge, the only debt that I have is my student loan. While I've had a credit card in the past (and always paid it off in full every month), I haven't had one in a long time, nor do I use an overdraft. I've never taken out a proper loan (not counting the student loan) for anything whatsoever in my life. I don't have much involvement in financial-heavy things like that.

I have an account with a letter and parcel forwarding service. This service provides me with a PO box address that accepts letters only, and another separate address that accepts parcels only. I don't make heavy use of this service, but have used the letter address for some subscriptions, and the parcel address for a total of four online purchases.

I was recently notified by this forwarding service that they received two letters delivered to the parcel address, which is against their rules. Normally they would just discard letters, or return them to the sender, but for whatever reason they decided to notify me about it in this case, complaining that I'm breaking their rules. Of course, I never asked anyone to send letters to this address, so it's not my fault. They made a special exception for these letters and forwarded them to my home address.

So I received the two letters today, and here are the details:

• They are both from "Link Financial", with a sender address that seems to match "Kearns" when I look it up online. It seems to be some kind of debt collection agency. I have never heard these names before in my life.
• At the top of each letter is a reference number, an original lender ("Bank of Scotland plc"), and an outstanding balance. One letter says the outstanding balance is around £300, and the other says it's around £4300 (not the exact numbers).
• Aside from the reference numbers and outstanding balances, both letters are totally identical in their written text.
• The letters say: "We have previously written and attempted to call you regarding your Bank of Scotland plc account which was sold to LC Asset 2 S.a. r.l. on 24/08/2020. To date, you do not have a re-payment plan set up and whilst we understand there can be many reasons for this, we want to assure you we can help. It can be a worrying time if you are struggling to deal with your debts but ignoring them will make it harder in the long term and may have a negative effect on your Credit Rating, affecting your ability to obtain credit now and in the future."
• The letters do not provide any details whatsoever about where this balance came from or why I should owe it.

I am baffled by these letters. There is no reason in my mind why I should have thousands of pounds in debt, or any debt at all, aside from my student loan. I don't have a lot of money, as I'm unemployed due to health issues and receiving Universal Credit currently, so this is very scary for me.

At first, I assumed these must just be some kind of spam or scam messages. But people say these are legitimate debt collectors, and that if they're chasing someone the debt must be real? And furthermore, they include my full name. So they're not just sending out messages to random addresses, but they know that that address is linked to me.

I want to re-iterate that these letters were sent to my parcel forwarding address. They were not sent to my home address. I have only ever used this parcel forwarding service for four online purchases. That means the only people who should even know of this address and it being linked to my name, are the online stores I purchased from, the couriers that delivered the package, the customs processing people, and the forwarding service themselves. So unless one of them sold the data, this supposed debt must be related to one of these things? I've never had any kind of Bank of Scotland bank account using this address.

Of the four parcels that I had delivered to this address, three of them were from outside the UK. With two of those international packages, I watched the online tracking with Parcelforce, and eventually it said they were waiting for payment of customs fees. So I phoned Parcelforce and paid those fees. With the last package, it was just delivered directly to the forwarding service with no fees needing to be paid. Naturally, I was happy about this, and assumed it must've been because the value was low enough to not need fees, or because the online store took the import fees already.

In my mind, the only way there could possibly be some debt is if that last parcel actually needed a customs fee paid on it. That's only a guess though. If that is the case, why would they have delivered it before receiving payment of the customs fees? If the courier paid the fees for me, why would I owe them anything — I don't have any kind of contract with the courier (only with the online store) and never asked them to do that for me.

And even if it were related to some kind of unpaid customs fee, why in the world would there be ~£300 and ~£4300 charges!?!?!?! The package was only worth £150, so if we assume 20% VAT and maybe a little more in duty costs, maybe it would be £30-50? Unless somehow something has been massively inflated, or they're adding thousands of pounds in fees for the debt collectors?

But it might not be related to any customs fee. Maybe it's something else. That's just the only remotely plausible thing I can think of. I don't know!

I want to re-iterate that the forwarding service normally forbids letters being sent to the parcel address. So if any previous letters were sent to this address about a debt, then I would never have received them and have no knowledge of them. This is the first I'm hearing about all this.

I'd really appreciate any advice with this. I'm confused and frightened, and not sure what to do about this. Do I just ignore it and "not accept" this debt? I genuinely don't understand what it's even for or why I should have to owe it.

Thanks in advance.

[Timewilltell]

So first things first, take a breathe and relax for a moment. Let’s look at this rationally.
have you ever had a BOS bank account,loan, credit card, overdraft.
Do you pay for the letter and parcel forwarding service, subscription, monthly etc? (It may be a form of credit set up by the operators of the forwarding service?)
If the answer to these is no, then I would call BOS and clarify the account and references as the letters state. Do not acknowledge the debt in any manner, that is to say they are yours at this stage.
It may be that some unscrupulous rascal has pinched your identity and had a loan on your behalf.
So establish the facts.
do not contact the sender of the letters for any reason.
feedback on this thread with any further information and we collectively can look at a forward strategy.

[Alphabet40]

Thank you very much for your reply.

have you ever had a BOS bank account,loan, credit card, overdraft.

Maybe?

I've never had a bank account with "Bank of Scotland", but I understand they do own some other banks.

I think Halifax is one of their owned banks, and I do have (or had?) a Halifax bank account, which is totally unused. It might have been closed already due to inactivity - I'm not sure. I remember signing up for a free current account with them, but then I ended up not actually using it for anything whatsoever. I definitely didn't have any kind of loan, credit card, or overdraft with them though.

I've had accounts with Nationwide and Barclays in the past, years and years ago. My main bank accounts are with NatWest and Starling, which I don't think are "Bank of Scotland" banks.

But all of those banks that I have or had accounts with know my home address, and shouldn't have any knowledge of the forwarding service address. So if it were really something to do with a bank, then I don't understand why or how these debt collectors would be writing to the forwarding service address. That doesn't make any sense to me.

I have had a credit card and an overdraft with Natwest before, years ago. I always paid the credit card off in full immediately after using it. The only reason I used it at all was because I was told it was a good practice. I only ever went into the overdraft by accident, and paid it off immediately afterwards when that happened. I no longer have any credit card or overdraft.

Do you pay for the letter and parcel forwarding service, subscription, monthly etc? (It may be a form of credit set up by the operators of the forwarding service?)

No.

I pay for the forwarding service via a pay-as-you-go method. There's no subscription fee for it. I top up the account as needed, and charges are made to that balance as letters or parcels are received and forwarded. I can log in and see that I have a positive balance on there currently.

If the answer to these is no, then I would call BOS and clarify the account and references as the letters state. Do not acknowledge the debt in any manner, that is to say they are yours at this stage.
It may be that some unscrupulous rascal has pinched your identity and had a loan on your behalf.
So establish the facts.
do not contact the sender of the letters for any reason.

Thank you very much for your advice. What would I say to Bank of Scotland exactly? Just tell them that I received these letters claiming I owe money and ask them for clarification? The letters do have reference numbers, but would those mean anything to Bank of Scotland or would they only have meaning to Link Financial? Not sure...

Thanks.

[The Tech Clerk]

Bank of Scotland & Halifax belongs to lloyds group

Natwest = Royal Bank of Scotland owners

[Still Waving]

Hi

I would not contact BoS ! You don't want to be inadvertently acknowledging a debt.

I think the first thing to do is check your credit record with the Credit Reference Agencies to see if there are any debts in your name. If there are, you should be able to glean a bit of information about the history.

[Alphabet40]

Okay, I tried looking up my credit report. I've never done this before though.

I tried Money Saving Expert's Credit Club first, but it said it couldn't identify me.

I then tried on the Experian website. It asked me to pick three different bank accounts from a list as a verification question. My main banks, Natwest and Starling, weren't on the list at all. I noticed that Link Financial was on this list — does this mean anything? I picked Barclays, Nationwide, and Halifax as my answers, and it let me through. The Experian website says my score is "Excellent", with a score of 999 out of 999.

I signed up for Experian's free 30 day trial, in order to access the full report:

• It says I have 0 new credit applications, £0 total borrowing, 0 credit cards, 0 loans, and 0 mortgages — which is all correct, apart from the student loan which I guess isn't factored in on here.
• It says I have 5 active accounts, which are with the banks I already know about, and for all of them it says they're in good standing with no issues that affect the score.
• It says I have 2 settled accounts (whatever that means) which are an old bank account and credit card that have since been closed. Again, it says they're in good standing with no issues.
• There's no mention of Link Financial, or Bank of Scotland, on the actual report.

So as far as I can tell, this all looks fine.

But this is with my home address. Again, the letters that I got were written to the forwarding service address. I did try checking on a couple of websites with the forwarding service's address, but they said they couldn't identify me.

[Roger]

Well you can send Bank Of Scotland a DSAR request
Just a request! Tell them nothing! You want SNail Mail response NOT Email
Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) | Credit Reference File

use this one keep proof posting also keep copies of everything. and update on here.

The DSAR will tell you if you Had or HAVE anything in that Banks records!