I really hope someone can give me some advice, it's quite a long story but in short I've recently found out I've got a CCJ and it's definitely not mine.
DH and I ran a business together, we were at that premises for 3 years starting about 9 years ago and it before we were married. We left this business premises and moved on to another business in a different area. The first premises was actually owned by a family member and when we left some new, unrelated tenants moved in. We left the business with no outstanding debts etc. and changed our details with HMRC and thought we had done everything we needed to.
So if we fast forward to now, we are looking to move house and applied for a new rental property, we were rejected and told it was because we have a CCJ - news to us! I have now been able to get all the details of the CCJ and it turns out it was at our first business but the debt was accrued 2 years after we had left and was in my married name, we weren't married at the time we we're there.
However the debt is with a supplier we used at that business, although we used them on a cash on delivery basis, we can't remember though if we ever signed anything for a credit facility with them, but we doubt it.
The tenants at the business after us were evicted after owing the owners thousands in unpaid rent and we also heard from a lot of other people that they had a lot of debts with various suppliers.
My first reaction was that these people had used our details to obtain credit and to wonder if this is identity fraud? We were given some details from the county court on how to set aside the debt but it seems we need a solicitor to help fill in the forms.
I asked CAB for some help with where to start and they have basically advised to be really careful because acknowledging the CCJ now would start it from day 1 again and that if we don't have a really watertight case that it's not our debt it's unlikely to be set aside and we'd be required to pay it. This all seems so wrong and unfair.
I think I'll need to get a solicitor to try and sort it out, but we really can't afford hundreds or thousands of pounds to sort it out, does anyone have any experience of how much something like this could end up costing us? Or anything I can do to get things going?
Thank you so much if you read all of that!