Hi everyone 
I used a national chain of letting agents ‘tenant find’ service for my first venture into buy to let mid last year. As a newbie to this and with COVID I left them to vet the tenants and carry out referencing and went with a couple they recommended. Problems started 2 weeks after moving in with violence and police visits and no rent was paid after the first month. When things started to go wrong I retrospectively looked closer at their referencing report and make contact with their last 2 landlords and it was clear employment details and previous landlord references had all been falsified. I eventually got them out 6 months in arrears and after a lot of legal costs.
I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts or experience as to whether the letting agent can/should be held responsible at all. I complained to them and made a case to at least have my fees refunded but they refused and claimed they had done a perfectly good job 
I suspect this will be a case of lesson learned the hard way for me and to be more careful in future but if anyone has had success in a situation like this I would love to hear about it.
Needless to say I have since used openrent to find tenants!
Many thanks.