From: "Bob W"
I'll try not to ramble.
>
[...]
>
> I AIN'T PAYING!
>
> I wrote disputes & mail them off to the three credit
> reporting agencies,
> and furnished copies of those letters to the credit union.
>
Awesome saga. I had a saga which lasted several years about paying my
household gas bill, while the company that claimed to be the supplier went
through several changes of ownership. The outcome was that they wrote off
the so-called 'debt' of over ?800- after I promised to pay it immediately in
full if they could produce a supply contract with my signature on. I also
asked under the terms of the Data Protection Act for a copy of all their
notes about and correspondence with me about this matter, but they couldn't
produce it - they claimed they didn't keep records!
In the UK we have something called the Data Protection Act which gives you
the right to ask for a copy of all personal data that a company holds about
you, and they are obliged to provide it. You can also force them to change
anything on your file which is factually incorrect, and to remove stuff
which is a matter of opinion. For instance 'This guy's a jerk and owes us
more than ?800-'. If you owe them nothing you can get that corrected, and
you can have them remove the opinion about you being a jerk. You can check
that they've done that by asking again for a copy of the records.
Bob
Yeah, that's kind of what the "dispute" does here. It probably won't
wipe the bogus collection out of the report, but the reporting companies
will have to include the dispute in the report.
Here, they can't report negative personal comments. The "this guy's a
jerk" would never make it into the file in the first place. The report
just says Such and So company [claims] some given dollar amount is past
due by more than X number of days (where x is 30, 60, 90, or 120).
For a recurring item such as a revolving credit account, they could also
put in there the number of times you had been late X number of days over
the last several years (seven I think).
The only problem is that once you get an item removed, there's nothing
that prevents the company that put it there from selling the claim to
another company who can start the process all over again.
This is the third time this same claim has come up, from the third
different company and I'm sure it'll come up again. At this point, even
if I was willing to pay the extortion, it'd still get sold to some other
company who'd try to collect it again.
... and again.
The really interesting thing is the report includes a list of all the
companies that pull your credit report, and there's a TON of them. It
looks like every bank that's sent me a "pre-approved" credit
application, checked my credit first.
I make sure to shred every one of them. Any junk mail that comes with my
name and address on it goes into the shredder.
BTW, I don't know if I said, but I did get the car.
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