Mum's £55k Coerced Debt Nightmare: How Boyfriend Sabotaged Her Finances

The Hidden Financial Abuse: When Trust Becomes a Weapon

For Rosa*, a 44-year-old former teacher from northwest England, the first signs of something terribly wrong appeared during the pandemic lockdowns. Her mobile phone would mysteriously vanish just as she prepared for work, joining a disturbing pattern of unexplained incidents that included disappearing credit cards, failing passwords, and what appeared to be a home burglary. What began as puzzling inconveniences would unravel into a devastating financial betrayal that would consume years of her life.

A Relationship Turned Financial Nightmare

Six agonising months passed before Rosa discovered the shocking truth: her boyfriend, the man she believed loved her, had been systematically sabotaging her financial life. Not only had he staged a fake break-in, but he had secretly accumulated a staggering £55,000 of debt in her name without her knowledge or consent. "I was shocked and devastated that someone I thought loved me could do those things to me," Rosa reveals, her voice still carrying the weight of that betrayal.

The abuse began more than a year into what Rosa describes as an initially "amazing" relationship. After moving into her home during the first COVID lockdown in March 2020, her partner began his calculated campaign of financial destruction. He convinced Rosa that her laptop had a virus and her phone had been hacked, even changing the locks after fabricating evidence of a burglary. Meanwhile, he was cancelling her cards, intercepting replacements, and hiding her phone so he could authorise payments while she worked as a key worker during the pandemic.

The Battle Against the System

If discovering the betrayal was traumatic, what followed proved equally devastating. Rosa found herself fighting a gruelling two-year battle against eleven different lenders between 2020 and 2022 to restore her credit record and regain access to basic financial services. "The companies failed me," she states bluntly. "They were actually putting the blame on the victim and pretty much criminalising me."

Lenders forced her to repeatedly prove her story across multiple departments, with debt collectors, through complaints procedures, and in some cases requiring intervention from the Financial Ombudsman. Responses varied dramatically not just between different lenders but even between staff members within the same organisation, creating what Rosa describes as an "exhausting" process that required relentless persistence.

Rosa represents just one face of a much larger crisis. According to debt charity Step Change, approximately 1.6 million people in the UK have been coerced into debt by partners, family members, or friends. This represents a form of coercive and controlling behaviour that constitutes a criminal offence and frequently occurs alongside other forms of domestic abuse.

Deidre Cartwright, senior policy manager at Surviving Economic Abuse (SEA), explains the devastating consequences: "They're cut out of the economy, out of housing, out of employment. It prevents them from being able to leave a very dangerous abuser who can be a threat to their and their children's lives."

The Financial Fallout

In just six months, Rosa's ex-partner managed to tank her credit score from "excellent" to "poor," leading her bank to close her account and making her ineligible for savings accounts, overdrafts, and mobile phone contracts. Her wages were stolen monthly, and without access to her accounts or mail, she remained unaware that her mortgage and home insurance had fallen into arrears.

"I remember putting Blu Tack on the camera on my laptop because I was so paranoid of every account being hacked," she recalls, illustrating the psychological toll of the abuse. The moment of realisation came when her partner tried to snatch her phone while a bank clerk explained that the thief must be inside her house. "It was in that moment that I thought, 'it's you'," she says.

Data from Money Advice Plus reveals that survivors must convince an average of seven different lenders to clear their name of approximately £23,000 in debt. While there are pockets of good practice, many lenders struggle to properly address economic abuse, often forcing it into generic vulnerability policies that create what Cartwright describes as a "painstaking, unstandardised, difficult process."

"There's a real lack of understanding and awareness of what coerced debt is and what their response to it could be," she adds, highlighting the systemic failures that compound victims' trauma.

Government and Industry Action

In a significant development, the current Labour government became the first British administration to name, define, and commit to rectifying coerced debt as part of its financial inclusion strategy announced last month. Britain's lenders, major credit reference agencies, and UK Finance have been tasked with developing new approaches to help victims access necessary financial products.

However, campaigners are demanding greater urgency. John Webb, head of consumer affairs at Experian, acknowledges the challenges: "We are really at a reasonably early stage in the process. We'd be talking about fairly large-scale, industry-wide guidance and mechanisms. You'd need to have everyone coming on board."

The main sticking points include establishing standardised thresholds and assessment methods, agreeing mechanisms for suppressing or removing credit history data, and determining how to avoid unintended consequences for victims. Webb notes that coerced debt presents particular difficulties because lenders must determine who applied for it, under what circumstances, how the money was spent, and whether it formed part of wider abuse, often without police reports to guide them.

Regulatory Framework and Future Directions

Existing Financial Conduct Authority rules require lenders to be fair and accurate when recording debt, with "appropriate regard" paid to vulnerable customers including victims of domestic abuse. However, Cartwright points out that lenders have different interpretations of what constitutes "fair and accurate," and clearly, a default imposed by an abuser does not represent a fair record of a victim's borrowing behaviour.

While UK Finance states that "financial services firms are committed to supporting victim-survivors of economic and financial abuse and have a wide range of support available," they acknowledge that "there is more to be done" regarding the complexities of helping victims regain financial control.

Cartwright raises crucial questions about implementation: "The devil's really in the detail. How will the Treasury actually be facilitating this collaboration? How will they be holding lenders and credit reference agencies to account? Will they be considering the need for guidelines, regulatory or legislative reform rather than just depending on the goodwill and good practice of credit reference agencies and lenders?"

A Call for Tangible Action

For survivors like Rosa, the pace of change feels painfully slow. "It's great to say it's our priority, but what are you actually going to do?" she asks pointedly. "I fought the companies - there are a lot of people that wouldn't be able to do that, and then what happens to them?"

Her experience highlights the urgent need for standardised, compassionate responses that recognise coerced debt as the serious crime it represents, rather than forcing victims to navigate a labyrinthine system that often compounds their trauma. As the government and financial industry work toward solutions, thousands of victims continue to pay the price for abuse they didn't commit, their financial futures hanging in the balance while systems slowly evolve to address this hidden epidemic of economic control.