Hello funkie1.

Old debts are frequently sold, even where some debtors might have become insolvent.

They're sold in packages so a wide variety of debtor circumstances might be included within a single sale.

I guess when your debt was sold your trustee had not been discharged so some prospect of receiving a dividend from your trust deed potentially existed, in theory at least.

You've been informed correctly that the debt cannot be enforced.

This is surprisingly normal. A lot of the big debt purchasers buy in such bulk that they cannot perform searches on every individual or account.

As disagreeable as it sounds, it is all a numbers game to them. If they buy 10,000 defaulted accounts at very low pence in the £ value they expect a percentage of those to end up repaying, a percentage who will be in active insolvency procedures from which they my receive a dividend and a smaller percentage whose account is no longer enforceable whether through insolvency, or even on occasion prescription.

Your Trustee is quite correct that they cannot enforce this against you.

Thanks for the prompt reply!

What I find surprising is the account was marked as settled on credit file back
In April... why would a company sell a settled /. Satisfied debt?

Hi funkie1.

I can see where you're coming from, but these are maybe very slightly different things.

You were discharged, so the lender could no longer enforce the debt against you.

However you'd be in a trust deed and the creditors don't necessarily get paid their dividend when you're discharged. Indeed, this probably happened quite late in the day when your trustee was preparing to get themselves discharged.

So no debt was recoverable from you, but the owner of the debt (old or new) may have still stood to receive a payment from your trust deed.

Probably more importantly, it's best not to personalize the scenario. These debts are sold in large packages. The seller and the buyer know that some debts will get fully recovered, some partially recovered, and some will result in no recovery at all. That's all factored into the price that is paid. You'd perhaps pay less for a package of debts that included a reasonable percentage of customers that had since become insolvent for example.

Keep an eye out that it does not hit your credit file. It would be fixed pretty quickly but you don't want to be caught out just in case the recovery administration does not do any diligence on the account before they start chasing the debt