Harwood Claims Management Ltd, trading as ReclaimPPIToday, has been told by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that it must change one of its adverts.

Claims on the website www.reclaimppitoday.co.uk promoted a claims management company. A page accessed by clicking on a tab labelled “I’ve never taken PPI” was headed “Do you think you’ve never had anything with PPI?” Text stated “You may think you don’t have anything with PPI but if you had a loan, credit card or mortgage at any point over the last 15 years or so there’s a very good chance it had PPI added to it and a very good chance you never even knew”.

A page accessed by clicking on a tab labelled “Was I mis-sold PPI?” contained a variety of headings including “The benefits of using a claims management company (CMC) for reclaiming PPI”. Text stated “We fully understand the processes and systems involved in reclaiming mis-sold PPI, along with how each lender operates its mis-sold PPI team. We deal with them on a daily basis and have the expertise to remove the banks’ ability to maneuver [sic] a client to a position they don’t want to be in”. Further text under the heading “PPI-hit consumers face stalling from banks” stated “Using us will mean you use a resource that has experience and a relationship with banks and can recognise a legitimate rejection from a dubious one”.

PJT Enterprises t/a Dispusolve challenged whether the following claims were misleading:

1. “You may think you don’t have anything with PPI but if you had a loan, credit card or mortgage at any point over the last 15 years or so there’s a very good chance it had PPI added to it and a very good chance you never even knew”, because they believed that a payment protection insurance (PPI) premium would have been evident to consumers where one was being charged; and

2. “We fully understand the processes and systems involved in reclaiming mis-sold PPI, along with how each lender operates its mis-sold PPI team. We deal with them on a daily basis and have the expertise to remove the banks’ ability to maneuver [sic] a client to a position they don’t want to be in”, “PPI-hit consumers face stalling from banks” and “Using us will mean you use a resource that has experience and a relationship with banks and can recognise a legitimate rejection from a dubious one”, because they believed that those claims implied that using a claims management company would increase the likelihood of a complaint being upheld, when that was not the case.

The ASA acknowledged that ReclaimPPIToday had amended the ad, but because it had not seen adequate evidence to demonstrate there was a high chance of PPI having been added to loans, credit cards and mortgages taken out in the past 15 years, it concluded that the claim was misleadingly exaggerated.

On both points, the ASA found the ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 (Misleading advertising), 3.7 (Substantiation) and 3.11 (Exaggeration). The ad must not appear again in its current form.

The ASA told ReclaimPPIToday to ensure their future ads did not state or imply there was a high chance that PPI had been added to financial products without consumers’ knowledge, or that their service offered consumers an increased chance of success, if that was not the case.