Bad Credit Repair Services And The Federal Law |
|
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)
protects the rights of every consumer and makes it mandatory for each credit bureau to maintain an accurate and verifiable account of your credit history. If you think that any information on your credit report is not correct, you are entitled to ask for an investigation and bad credit repair is essentially the process of disputing such negative information with each major credit bureau. The credit bureaus have to verify the accuracy of the dispute within a realistic amount of time (usually thirty days) and if they cannot do so, they have to remove the disputed items from the report. However, bad credit repair services
cannot ask credit bureaus to remove negative information if the same is
accurate. If you want, you can do bad credit repair on your own, but if you don't have time, you can take the help of one of the many bad credit repair services. Once the dispute has been made, the credit bureau must ask each creditor to verify the information under dispute and if the information is found to be inaccurate, the credit bureau must update, correct or delete such information from the credit report. If the creditor does not respond within a reasonable amount of time, the particular item would still have to be removed from the credit report. There are many bad credit repair services available to help you with bad credit repair. However, there are both honest and disreputable bad credit repair services and it is essential to know your rights under the FCRA before you talk to any one of them. Recently many laws have been enacted with a view to protecting the rights of the consumers. Some of them are: 1) Bad credit repair services should either be a law firm or they cannot charge until their promised job has been done. 2) Bad credit repair services will explain in detail the process of bad credit repair and the FCRA and they will not make any false claim about how they perform bad credit repair. 3) They will not repair credit until a contract has been signed and a three day waiting period has elapsed during which the consumer can cancel the contract without paying any fees. 4) The bad credit repair service cannot ask you to make false statements on a loan or credit application, misrepresent your Social Security number, or advise you to get an Employer Identification Number from the Internal Revenue Service under false pretenses. If you do any of those, you would be committing fraud. Such bad credit repair services are disreputable and should be avoided. You must remember that no one has access to the credit bureaus' database and accurate and verifiable information cannot be removed permanently and will remain on your credit report. As such the guarantees which bad credit repair services give have no standing. If you want to attempt bad credit repair on your own, you will have to follow the following steps. Tell the credit bureau in writing about the information you believe is inaccurate and include copies of documents to support you. Give your complete name and address and explain why you are disputing the information. Enclose a copy of your credit report highlighting the items in question and send the letter by certified mail, return receipt requested and keep copies of all documents sent. On completion of investigations the credit bureau must provide you the written results and a free copy of your credit report if a change is made. If you want, the credit bureau must send notices of any correction to anyone who received your credit report in the past six months and a corrected copy of your credit report will be sent to anyone who received it during the past two years for employment purposes. It is important to know that most bad credit will disappear in 7 years, except bankruptcy which takes 10 years and criminal convictions and information related to employment. You can greatly improve your credit worthiness by actively monitoring your credit report and repairing bad credit on learning of a misinformation. |
