Address changed without permission

[FrancineSmith]

DH & I are having some money problems and going through a debt charity to try and get it sorted. In the meantime some of our debts have not received any payment for up to 2 months.

He's just had a call from a relative that he hasn't lived with for 20 years to say they have a letter for him from a catalogue company.

He's been on the account online to see what's going on and it appears they have changed our billing address to this (very) old one, without his knowledge or consent.

Obviously they are chasing the money owed to them, but can they do this legally? Will this have any impact on the relative's credit rating as their address has now been linked to our address?

[FrancineSmith]

*linked to our debt rather, not our address

[prh47bridge]

That is probably a cock up. Possibly a breach of data protection. It shouldn't affect the relative's credit rating. The rating relates to the person, not the address.

[cookiefiend]

A similar thing happened to DM recently (not the debt, but bank reverting to an old address without instruction). They realised during a phone call apologised and put £200 into her account as compensation for breaching the data protection act. All as a standard response- DM hadn't complained or anything.

[FrancineSmith]

Thanks for the replies, I hadn't thought about the data protection issue.