Dear BNZ
I am writing this victim impact statement to you because the courts probably won’t let me read it.
I want you to know what it has been like to have been a customer with your bank over these past years.
As you know I am in financial hardship. I have a debt to the bank for a little more than $6200.00 or so say the Disputes Tribunal order that is now against me.
When I wrote to you in 2013 to offer a settlement for the credit card debt, you withheld the interest for just three months. That did nothing to help make things a little less stressful.
Time went on and I sent you two cheques and repayment plans, you returned them and would not accept any payment arrangement. You sent the debt to your debt collection agents EC Credit Control (NZ) Ltd. (ECCC).
They forced further debt against me and threatened to continue to contact me if I refused to give them another phone number.
You allowed them to prepare the disputes tribunal application against me. They falsified the information in it by creating letters that had never been sent to me. The agent who signed the letters and the tribunal claim also claimed there was an online document that I had declared. That document I believe never existed. It was not included in the tribunal claim. Only the fake letters and the statements showing the balance and interest and penalties. In good faith I agreed to having a credit card with the bank. But I left that hearing with a judgment against me and two weeks to pay you in full even though the bank knew I would not have been able to comply with the order.
As you know I counterclaimed the tribunal application. I simply could not believe a bank of your standing could have prepared such a false document. The tribunal referee actually dismissed entirely my counterclaim. Now a precedent is set so other banks can do the same to others.
I appealed the tribunal decision and paid $200.00 to put in the application. In just a few minutes the hearing was over and again my claims dismissed without consideration.
After the tribunal hearing you wrote and told me you would not enter into any payment arrangement. Even though you had agreed at the tribunal hearing to not increase the debt, you still allowed your collection agents to do so and they increased the debt by nearly $2,000.00
I decided to pay you anyway in monthly instalments because there was nothing else I could do. What a shock to find that you had no record of those payments. I discovered later that you had passed the money to the debt collector without telling me. A payment went missing. Only to be revealed by the Affidavit of the debt collector you allowed to falsify the tribunal application against me. The missing payment was only small but that wasn’t the issue. You stated in an email that you were no longer using that debt collection company. That turned out to be a lie.
You then made an order for a financial assessment hearing. When I asked for an extension of time because I had less than three weeks to prepare a whole year’s worth of information, you withdrew the order.
Your cruelty knows no bounds. I was then issued with a bankruptcy notice prepared again by the same collection company, but in your name. And served by your private investigator.
I defended the claim to have the notice set aside. Again that was rejected. Even though I am not yet bankrupted the judgment is still on the website for all to see. As you know I was given a month to pay you or make a payment arrangement. The courts have now cleared the way for you to bankrupt me. The Judge even said that no consideration is given to the fact that other creditors probably won’t get paid if I am bankrupted. I had listened to some other bankruptcy cases and the judges don’t actually consider the debtor’s circumstances whatsoever. At the court hearing I referred to case law and asked for the Judge to “look behind” the original judgment, but a tribunal order is final and can never be undone.
I wrote to you via your solicitors who also act for your debt collector. On your behalf they refused any settlement. They also “shared” my letter with their client. They didn’t say who their client was. I thought that was funny because the letter I wrote was addressed to you C/- your solicitors and I also forwarded you a copy. I had already advised you that I won’t deal with your collection agents because they falsified the bank’s claim against me. That didn’t stop them from increasing the debt or suggesting repayments that were nearly 70% of my total income.
Just like the tribunal order, ECCC were not included in the judgement against me. The judge said that they cannot enforce the debt. But you are still insisting that any money I pay to the bank will be passed to the collectors, who will then pass it back to the bank. You also told me that you do not know how much the debt is because you have passed my file to the debt collectors. That also was not in the order of the Judge. The order stated that any money paid to the bank is a good discharge of the debt or part thereof. How can that be when you won’t tell me how much is owed or enter into any payment arrangement.
There is nothing I can do if you continue to use debt collectors who operate outside the law. Your bank’s six promises mean nothing. The integrity of the banking system has been lost. I no longer trust the banking system. Even ANZ bank who there is also debt with have not complied with their lending codes. As you know the banking ombudsman found in my favour because ANZ had not conducted any assessment of my ability to repay their loan after they offered money to me after the earthquakes. Yes I should not have accepted the money. It was a deal too good to be true.
Today I’m paying the price. Even Veda Advantage told me they linked historical data to my credit report, which resulted in the report losing points and the ageing of the report is now incorrect.
My credit score is so low it will never recover and I will never be able to borrow money again, ever.
The life as I knew it before is over. My hopes for a better more prosperous life have been stifled because of your cruel actions. I will live out the rest of my days trying to change our laws so you can’t do the same to others.
LC
