Before we provide you with materials, products or services, we may use personal information you have given us together with information we have collected from external sources such as credit reference agencies, company reports and profiles, electoral role, directories, or fraud prevention agencies. We use this information to manage our credit risk, and prevent and detect fraud and money laundering. We’ll also use these organisations to confirm your identity. We might also share the information with other organisations. We do this because it’s in our, and the organisations’, legitimate interests to prevent fraud and money laundering, and to check identities, to protect our business and to keep to laws that apply to us.
Details of the personal information that will be used include your name, address, company name if relevant, contact details, financial information, employment details if relevant.
If you don’t become one of our customers, we’ll still keep the result of these checks about you if we have a legal obligation and it’s in our legitimate interests to help prevent or detect fraud. Fraud prevention agencies can hold your personal information for different periods of time, and if you are considered to pose a fraud or money laundering risk, your information can be held by us and the organisations we share it with for up to ten years.
If you give us false or inaccurate information which we identify as fraudulent, we’ll pass that on to fraud prevention agencies. We might also share it with law enforcement agencies, as may the agencies we have shared the information with.
If you tell us you’re associated with someone else financially (for example, by marriage or civil partnership), we’ll link your records together. So you must make sure you have their agreement to share information about them. The agencies we share the information with also link your records together and these links will stay on your and their files – unless you or your partner successfully asks the agency to break that link.
If we, a credit reference or fraud prevention agency, decide that you are a credit, fraud or money laundering risk, we may refuse to provide the services or financing you have asked for, or we may stop providing existing services to you.
The credit reference and fraud prevention agencies will keep a record of any fraud or money laundering risk and this may result in other organisations refusing to provide services, financing or employment to you. If you have any questions about this, please get in touch with us using the contact details found in the 'How to contact us and further details' section below.
We may send credit reference and fraud prevention agencies information about you, and they keep that information. We might also give them details of your accounts and bills, including how you manage them. This includes telling them about your account balances, what you pay us and if you miss a payment (going back in the past, too). So if you don't pay your bills on time, credit reference agencies will record that. They, or a fraud prevention agency, might tell others doing similar checks – including organisations trying to trace you or recover money you owe them.
There are different credit reference agencies in the UK (for example, Callcredit, Equifax and Experian). Each one might hold different information about you. If you want to find out what information they have on you, they may charge you a small fee.
Whenever credit reference and fraud prevention agencies transfer your personal information outside of the European Economic Area, they place contractual responsibilities on the organisation receiving it to protect your information to the standard required in the European Economic Area. They may also make the organisation receiving the information subscribe to ‘international frameworks’ aimed at sharing information securely.
When we have been contacted a reasonable number of times by the same person without securing any sales of materials, products or services; it may be treated as a delusive contact and future correspondence treated appropriately with the company in house policies. Your details will be kept and flagged up on the system when future correspondence is made to ensure the companies operation and safety is priority. These details will include your name, address, contact phone number and email address including a description of previous correspondence made; and maybe kept for up to ten years or longer depending on the seriousness of the correspondence and repeated nature of it.