Had a demand for payment fron debt collectors - but it makes no sense...

[RoxyMonoxide]

I have this morning received a letter from a company called Levi Black and Associates acting on behalf of their client E.On. It states that I am being pursued for an unpaid debt of 318.65. There are many problems with this:

1. The letter was forwarded to me from an address I left in Sept 2005. Surely if I owed money to a company they wouldn't wait 2.5 years to ask me to pay it?

1. I have no idea who E.On are, and am quite certain I have never used any of their services

1. I do not know that I owe anyone anything - I am pretty competent with my family's finances and always make sure bills are paid properly.

Has anyone else had experience of this? Could it be a scam?
I don't want to pay it (despite the threats of CCJs etc in the letter) because I don't believe it belongs to me. Am a bit worried about it, though.

It certainly could be a scam. There have been a few recently asking for payment and not actually specifying what the payment is for.
I'd google the company and then take letter to CAB....

I think Eon used to be called Powergen if that helps at all.

Just googled. E.on is a power / gas company. Ring any bells?

look on www.debtquestions.co.uk on the message boards, there will be posts which say which companies this debt collectors act for.

There you go. Powergen.

e.on are an energy supply company.
call the debt collection agency, and ask for copy bills.
it's probably just an admin error.

Eon are an electrical company. Companies can and do wait this long as they 'sell' the debts to collection agencies once it is getting close to the legal cut-off date The company gets a certain percentage of the money owed from the collection company, the collection company then do all the leg work but they get the full payment from you.

Thanks.

I have googled Levi Black and Associates, and discovered them only on a financial consumer talkboard. Apparently they have had several aliases, and there are more people being pursued for money they know they do not owe - all power companies - and many of these people have found discrepancies in the demands for payment i.e name spelt incorrectly, wrong address information.

Now I know it's a power company, I know for sure it is a scam, because when I lived at the address the demand for payment was sent to, the house was provided free with DH's job, and that included utilities. So I wasn't even the contact they would have had. I did have accounts with Powergen, but only at the addresses I lived at afterwards, and surely the records would have been updated then.

I think I will ignore it.

Just thought I'd add a footnote to clarify (and offer a bit of a warning).

I rang the company, and they do seem to be a legitimate debt collection agency. However, they are chasing payment for electricity used at my old house for the 14 months after I left there. I now have to prove - which, thankfully I can - that I wasn't at the address at the time the bills went unpaid.

Makes me a bit though, that like so many things, a debt that is not yours can haunt you because of the addresses you have lived at (and I have lived at quite a few). Individual responsibility should be all that is taken into consideration, not which address you live/have lived at. The electricity company know where I was at that time, because I set up a direct debit to pay them from my new address, and we all know you have to state your previous address. You would think that one would automatically cancel out the other.

Hi, Levi Black is legitimate and whilst you may have been given the property with DH's job, if they didn't register as liable for the bill then unfortunately since houses are now left with utility supplies left on it is up to the company to find who is liable.

With this in mind the utility company will have passed the bill on to a debt agency and they will use tools such as the voters roll to find out who was in the property during that time. This is why you will have got the letter, don't ignore it as it will keep cropping up - just forward them on to those responsible.

We were chased for money owing for the 9 months before we moved into our house. Even though we'd phoned and set up our account (with the same company) on the day we moved in. It was sorted in the end, but by British Gas and not the debt collection company, who were unhelpful in the extreme.

i'm glad you've sorted it.

just posting to give you another side of the story (ish)
when i worked for Powergen, I had to go through a spreadsheet of closed accounts that had money owed and send the details to a debt collection agency.
quite a lot of the time the accounts were linked to previous tenants but i was told still to send the details of the account as it would be deleted if the address didn't match the tenants at the tiem of the debt.
so i can see where the information would be lost, confused or skewed.

the amount of accounts i sent up that had no debt at all, just because it was the only way to close the dead account down!

still, when i took over my shop building, i had the same problem: that they tried to recover a debt from me that was the previous tenants. luckily i knew what had happened so i was able to sort it out without panicking! it would have been very worrying if i'd not understood how it had happened.