Martin Lewis’ warning to anyone who bought car before 2021 leads to 130,000 drivers coming forward already
If you bought a car a few years back you could be owed some money, and it never hurts to check
Thousands of motorists have heeded a warning from Martin Lewis to check and see if they could be owed some compensation because they bought their car before 2021.
The Money Saving Expert recently explained that Brits who bought a car or van between 2007 and 2021 could collectively be owed 'billions'.
It's like this, if you bought your vehicle with a Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) or finance agreement then you might be in line for some money thanks to a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) investigation.
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The FCA announced it'd be investigating after 'more than 10,000' reports and is looking into the possibility that people who bought their car on finance might have been unfairly charged inflated prices.
As Lewis explained, there are claims that car dealers were told by lenders organising the finance deals that they could get more commission money by just increasing the cost of finance.
He also noted that the FCA likely wouldn't investigate unless it was confident of finding wrongdoing.
It sounds like this has had a decent impact as Lewis and his Money Saving Expert team last night (6 February) launched their 'car finance commission reclaiming tool' and he said it had already 'generated 130,000 complaint letters for people.
According to his site, around 40 percent of car finance deals contained 'discretionary commission agreements', while Lewis predicted that the average successful complaint would receive a payout of around £1,100.
All in all, if the number of people complaining since he launched his 'commission reclaiming tool' yesterday were roughly representative of the people affected by this it'd already mean payouts totalling £57 million.
Basically, if you think this is something that might have affected you then Lewis is recommending you use his site's reclaim tool to send in a complaint of your own.
He stressed that you can't be blacklisted for complaining and that you should get your letter in sooner rather than later.
However, after that it'd be a matter of playing the waiting game as you'd likely not hear back before the FCA is done with its investigation, which at the moment sounds like it'll wrap up in September.
When that happens if evidence of wrongdoing has been found then Lewis has said it'll figure out how best to give people their money back.
If you think this sounds like you then it sounds like your best course of action would be to hop on and lodge a complaint to see if you're one of the people in line for compensation.
That Martin Lewis seems like a very helpful chap.
Topics: Martin Lewis, Money, Cars, UK News
Joe Harker