Data protection breach - would you message a stranger involved?

[AmIAWeed]

I checked my credit score between Christmas and New Year as we're thinking about moving house.
My credit score is awful - there are multiple accounts from about 10 different companies I have had no dealings with, it would appear there is another person with my name and date of birth. For some reason when her debts have been passed to a debt company there has been a mistrace.
I can see her home address, who she owes money to, how much, when she has/hasnt made payments I know if they are credit cards, loans or hire purchase and the last 4 digits on her accounts.
I have contacted every company who are unbelievably slow to do anything.
Ive contacted the company I got my credit score through and signed up to the other 2 credit agencies and low and behold on one other she appears there as well (still waiting for access to the third)
Knowing her name and town I have found her on Facebook.
This is affecting my credit score, but its also a major data protection breach for her.
Would I be unreasonable to message her and tell her? Hopefully she'll kick off at the companies as well for sharing her info...or she might not as she owes most of them money!

If they don't settle it within the legal allotted time frame, go to the Financial Ombudsman as soon as their time is up. The FO has been brilliant in sorting out a problem for me. My problem started in December 2018 and the Company concerned kept getting it wrong all the time and promising they would put it right but they never did until the FO stepped in. And I got compensation awarded to me by the FO.

Most of the problem will be that they have staff who just do not know how to correct a problem and that's why you get bumped from pillar to post because they hope you will go away as they don't know what to do. The FO TELLS them what to do.

I don't have any advice about what has happened to you OP and I hope you get it sorted.

I just wanted to point out what an awful bunch of judgmental twats have replied to this thread who know nothing about the circumstances of the person who has got into this debt.

Her character has been attacked, she's been accused of being a criminal with no evidence whatsoever just the snotty judgment of you lot. I'm honestly disgusted. My instinct is to say fuck you all but I'm clearly a nicer person. So I hope that if you're ever in financial trouble that people around you show a bit of compassion.

I second getting on to the Financial Ombudsman today, they are brilliant (and very good at placing a rocket under the arse of this sort of nonsense) and can take over dealing with "computer says no" calls for you until it is properly resolved. Also if anything comes up in the future you can go straight back to them.

Go via the credit people in case she had used your data.

Don't contact her. She has the same name dob and will then also have your email details.

Check my file is the one that covers the widest scope of checks.

@handinclove I agree some people do end up in debt through circumstances but you do need to engage with companies if you owe them money and can't pay. Work with them, show them your income and expenditure to come up with a repayment plan. If the person had been doing this the debt companies wouldn't have used a trace company.
Additionally, and I didn't put this in my previous posts seeing the companies they owe money to, when they have taken the loan or cards out they owe companies money, default yet continue to take out additional loans. Sadly whatever their situation, they aren't helping it and it's impacting me so I'm not particularly sympathetic towards them

Hi @AmIAWeed I know this is a while ago but I wondered how this was resolved in the end as my Husband has exactly the same problem plus someone applying for finance in his name! I’m stressed beyond belief over it and would appreciate any words of advice. Thanks x

Hi @Bingo78 I wish I had a super happy ending to tell you.
After my last post...all companies who were showing as a debt and even those on my credit file that weren't defaulted said the debt is real, and so they wont agree to have it removed from my credit file. They all said its down to the credit agency to correctly put it against the right person.
One debt agency when I contacted them actually put my address on their system from the complaint which somehow made it onto the account, They found this, apologised (paid out some sorry money) and said they deleted it. The debt collection calls continued and whilst they deleted my address they didn't delate my number. They apologised again (paid out more sorry money) this didn't get the items removed from my credit file, but did stop the company who made the link worse stop falsely reporting my address, by that point thought the link was made with the credit agencies.
After I exhausted the complaints procedure of TransUnion and Equifax.
TransUnion did 'fix' the issue manually in February last year and then put the others persons data on my file the following month. They removed it again and since then it has remained off.
Equifax refuse to acknowledge this is an issue for them to fix.

This was escalated to the Financial Ombudsman in March and they didn't allocate it to anyone until the middle of December,
There are some details from the complaint I don't want to share on here as it's still ongoing, but I'll send you a PM now with the extras.

For anyone else that finds themselves in this situation - even if you pass it to the Financial Ombudsman it will not resolve quickly sadly. For the last year I can't work on certain accounts at work as I'd fail the credit checks. When our boiler broke I took a loan from my company which I'm repaying at a much higher rate than I would have anyway. My credit card balance couldn't get moved to 0% so I have been paying quite a bit in interest. We also can't even consider moving as we wouldn't get a mortgage, we looked at porting the mortgage but there wasn't enough equity on our current home to get us to the 'next step up'. I couldn't even get a phone on contract for my kids when theirs ran out.
Every month up until about November I was getting calls from debt collectors. It has been a year from hell and that's without Covid which has caused my income to drop by a 1/3rd!