When a member received a letter from the ‘Consumer Refund Service’ they got in touch with us to make sure it was legitimate. Here’s what we told them.
The letter the member received wasn’t directly addressed to them, but said they were potentially owed a PPI refund of £3,219.
According to the letter, this is the average amount its customers get from PPI refunds, and that it would be free to check if the member was eligible.
The letter looked legitimate and professional, as did the company’s website, but the member told us they’d learned by now not to trust any promise of money from out of the blue. They asked us ‘could this be a scam?’
Claims management companies
The Consumer Refund Service (CRS) isn’t a scam but a claims management company.
For a fee, these companies will handle PPI claims on your behalf. CRS, for instance, will take a hefty 24% cut of your refund – so if you received a payout of £3,000, for example, it would take £720.
However, CRS has no way of knowing whether you were missold PPI unless you give it more details.
Fortunately, you don’t need to pay a claims management company to handle PPI claims. Instead, you can use our free tool, which sends your claim directly to banks and lets you keep every penny of your compensation.
How to deal with junk mail
As the 29 August deadline for PPI claims approaches, it’s likely you’ll see more of this sort of marketing. If you want to stop it, register with Royal Mail’s door-to-door opt-out service.
Read our guide to stopping unwanted mail
This won’t stop mail addressed to ‘the occupier’, however, so write ‘unsolicited mail, please return to sender’ on the envelope and post it. This will force the sender to pay return postage and might put it off sending you more junk mail.
Have you received unsolicited mail from a claims management company? How did you deal with it?
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