How difficult an ordealis it gonna be to get 2 invalid items removed from my credit report?

Factual Questions
1

I just pulled my yearly credit report from annualcreditreport.com. There are 2 negative items on my report that belong to my father.

A year and a half ago I moved into his place for a while when he was having some health issues. Im guessing they got on my report due to sharing an address and name. It is for 2 bills from his hospital that have gone to collections. He has a history of poor credit, so i’ve never cosigned or put my name to any document that would potentially tie us together.

It’s 2am, so i’m not gonna start calling the credit agencies or hospital right now. But it has me rather irritated.

Will this be a pretty painless ordeal to correct this or should I prepare myself for a giant headache?

2

You dispute them. That part is pretty easy. Then, if they are bogus, they will be removed, that takes maybe a month. The problem is, they may come back, so be vigilant.

3

Yeah, i know i have to dispute them. I was just wondering if anyone had experiences with this and if it is difficult to get them to see my dispute is legit. This thread may be more appropriate for IMHO since i’m looking more for personal experience stories and advice.

4

Just calmly contest it. I think things are put there sometimes without proper vetting or procedures.

I had some bogus legal judgement turn up on my report, (same name, not me however) and it was removed within a couple of weeks.

5

I had a similar issue a few years ago where I canceled a service and 2.5 years later they put a charge off on my report without ever contacting me (never sent a bill or anything). They then sold the charge off to a collection agency that reported a second negative as “open collections account”. This, BTW, was a large tier 1 telecom operator, not some fly-by-night company.

What I found was that when you file a dispute they contact the creditor and the creditor has 30 days to respond. If there is no response the negative entry is removed. There is no limit on how often you can dispute an entry in your report. Sooner or later the creditor will put your file on backup tape and it will require actual work to retrieve it. Once that happens your odds are good that they won’t respond within the 30 days.

I disputed my original charge off twice and then it was removed. Once that was gone I disputed the open collections account on the basis that the original charge off had been invalid. That one was removed on the first dispute.

So I needed a total of 3 disputes, and the whole thing took about 8 months. Good thing I didn’t need a mortgage or a car loan during that time.