A friend of mine bought an 05 Jeep Grand Cherokee 3½ years ago from a private individual. He paid for a full HPI check, arranged his own bank loan, paid cash and got a signed receipt. A few weeks ago he was contacted by a debt collection agency saying that the car was financed by an arm of Barclays on a lease scheme for a business. Luckily he hasn’t let them know where the car is. Barclays says it has a copy of the invoice for when it purchased the car – but says that it’s dated after my friend bought the car. i.e. They acquired it some time after he’d taken it home. My friend can get little out of Barclays. They won’t tell him who they bought it from, pleading Data Protection. They have told him who’s supposedly leasing the car from them but that’s largely irrelevant – apart from the fact that the lessees don’t have it. Barclays are currently considering their next move. Obviously no one will have been making the payments for three years or so, so it’s taken Barclays quite some time to take action. But the main point is that even though my friend’s name is on the V5 as the registered keeper, the asset is registered with Barclays and we assume he won’t be able to sell it. We were considering taking Barclays to the Small Claims Court to recover the cost of the asset. Have you come across this sort of thing before and might you have any advice?