As some of you know, I had a slightly worrying time for the last month in Japan since during worldcon my mother had rung me to say that there was a debt collection agency letter in Reading saying I owed Volkswagen Finance £4,700. So, after I got back, I contacted the debt collection company, who were pretty unhelpful and delayed further action for a week but required me to get a crime number before they’d do anything else. The police, on their crime reporting phone line, wouldn’t give me a crime number without more details that the debt collection agency wouldn’t (or couldn’t) give me, like at what address the loan was taken out, for what vehicle etc. Once I felt like I was stuck in a cross between Kafka and Heller, the police crime recorder threw me a lifeline, telling me that I should go to a local Volkswagen dealer (she even gave me the phone number and address of one in Reading) and report the loan as fraud to them.

I did that on Saturday afternoon and finally found someone very helpful at the VW dealer. He took ownership of the problem, took my details and found out some more about the loan for me. He couldn’t get it sorted then because the fraud group of the finance company don’t work weekends, but promised to contact them and me early this week. Today, Tuesday, he did ring me to say that he’s spoken to the fraud group who had agreed it was most likely fraud and that they’d start the ball rolling. Later a chap from the fraud group rang me direct and checked a number of things out, and finally gave me the address at which the fraudulent loan had been taken. They’ve now marked that as a fraudulent address for me and arranged to put a password on my credit record so that any future credit applications using those details will be flagged up, although I’ll have to jump through an extra hoop to get credit myself.

I was very impressed with the chap at the local VW dealer. He made sure things got dealt with, and quickly. He had the right attitude that although it wasn’t anything to do with their dealership (the address was in Kirkcaldy, and I’m assuming the dealer was also somewhere up there) that they were part of VAG and that this needed to be sorted out as quickly and smoothly as possible.