Instant Credit Report: Force Your Lender To Tell The Truth |
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Sometimes things go wrong and leave a mark on your instant credit report. There are two types of instant credit report
mistakes: information that's outright inaccurate and information that reflects the errors from your side. There's no denying self-inflicted instant credit report gashes. But what do you do when your first bank is reporting lies to lenders? There's a pretty good chance that your instant credit report is not a mirror image of your credit history. The harshness of the mistake can range from the rather small (such as incorrect spelling of your name) to the extreme (one man was informed by his lender that he was being reported as dead). Most inaccuracies fall in the rather ordinary category of late payments, which you'll find as 30, 60, or 90 days past due. Tell The Lender That He Is Wrong When you find misleading entries in your instant credit report, you can either dispute it with the credit agency or go to your suspicious lender. You'll most likely be best served by dealing with the latter, because the credit bureaus report only what they are given by your creditors. Your Fact-Finding Mission Includes Two Steps: 1. Call the creditor who's reporting misleading information and get the full name, job title, department name, telephone number, and address of the person who is handling your dispute. Be courteous, if only to earn a few points. 2. Gather proof. You'll need to validate your claim of inaccurate information. You can use anything for the proof like from canceled payment checks to past billing statements. You'll need to get past account statements to support your claim if your statement filing system isn't up to snuff. But you are lucky, the Fair Credit Billing Act requires the creditor to keep your past statements on instant credit report so that you can access them. But you'll probably have to pay for it. Call the billing or records department of your creditor and ask for what you need. It's Time To Write A Letter to Lender If the entries you are disputing are truly incorrect or incomplete, almost all of the inaccuracies can be corrected with a single letter. Write a brief note describing the inaccuracies you've found in your instant credit report and request that the entry be corrected. Attach copies of any supporting documentation. Use any leverage you might have as a current customer of the offending business. What you will do if the mistakes in your instant credit report not resolved within 30 days? In this case you should clear that you know Fair Credit Reporting Act laws and you can also take legal action. Call your lender and get the name of someone in its legal department. Send your letter to the company's attorney and your original contact in the disputes department. If your creditors don't agree with you then they should have to explain you why the information is correct and accurate in your instant credit report. It may happen that your creditors somehow misunderstood your dispute, in this case you can write another letter to them or they can also be correct in their explanation (if this happen then you have a bad memory.) Hopefully one of the letters to your original creditor, along with your proper documentation, will resolve any disputes of mistaken information in your instant credit report. In the event they don't, however, you may need to actually pursue legal action. In this situation your state's attorney general's office can help you with a lawyer who will counsel you on taking a creditor to court. If you are unsuccessful in erasing disputed items from your instant credit report then don't despair, you have the legal right to attach a letter of explanation to your credit file. Be sure that you cover all of the 3 credit bureaus as well as the offending business. So inform credit agencies about the inaccurate information in your instant credit report and get it corrected. |
