Woman wins multi-million dollar lawsuit against Equifax.
She tried for *10 years * to get errors removed from her credit report…hopefully this will make the credit reporting agencies sit up and take notice.
Check your credit report! www.annualcreditreport.com. I check mine every four months…a different agency each time.
Is this sort of thing classed as libel?
I don’t know. Certainly she suffered financially from the married report. We need some legal minds to weigh in. I guess it goes to whether they knew the information was wrong and did nothing to change it, or whether they couldn’t be arsed to investigate and keep her report correct.
The key about credit reporting agencies is that they are not responsible for the content of the report. Each month, the companies who report to them (see small paragraph in most bank/loan/credit card applications) simply report their accounts receivable with assorted notes.
The agency simply sells that back to other businesses/individuals who request it.
A credit report should be pulled by owner at least once every six months. You can do this at no charge (in Canada, anyway).
There are very few here: Equifax, Trans Union, maybe another that I’m not aware of.
You must correct the mistakes at the source, that is, the reporting company. For example, you owe the CIBC $150.00 and you have for six months. But you pay a set payback amount each month. They will report total debt at $150.00 with each payment being on time (R1). Should you default for two, possibly three months, you move to an R3 which means you pay, just late. If it’s the bank’s fault you’re late, you must correct it through the bank, not Equifax. They can put a note on the file. You can also put an explanatory note on the file through Equifax as to the reason you were reported late. The worse filing is R9 which means bankrupt or otherwise bailing on paying.
The only thing the credit agencies are responsible for is to sort the files correctly i.e. John Smith, Jr vs John Smith. It would appear that’s what happened in her case but it could have been the name the bank/mortgage company inquired under. The only thing I do, when signing an agreement which will report to the credit agencies, is insist they use social insurance number, nothing else to match the file.
It’s a maintenance thing, especially in this day and age when identity theft is so prevalent.
In the US, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (as amended by several subsequent statutes including Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act) requires that upon receipt of a disputed fact from the subject of a credit report, the reporting agency must verify the fact with the creditor. If the fact is found to be incorrect or can not be verified, then the reporting agency must remove the item from the report. So mistakes are generally corrected through disputing them en masse with the reporting agency, rather than individual creditors.
I had something of a Catch 22 though. I got information from IBM that their employment records had been hacked, so they paid for a year of credit checking and identity theft watch. Each month I get a report that nothing suspicious has happened. But then when I applied for a mortgage, my credit score was affected by “frequent inquiries” into my credit. Of course, the fraud checker people also reported to me that the mortgage people had requested info!
I’m hoping inquiries by a legit function like the fraud checker don’t count too badly against me??
I’d heard this problem as well - every search is logged, and lot sof searches can lower your score.
I think it suggests that you’re looking to borrow money, but keep getting turned down after a search… which implies you’re a bad risk.
Self-fulfilling in a way!
Doesn’t it depend on the type of searches? I mean, people usually shop for mortgage rates, so having several different inquiries from mortgage companies shouldn’t hurt, unless you’re planning on buying six houses at once.
I do not believe checking your own credit hurts you.
Checking on your credit report does not generate a ‘hard inquiry’, which would temporarily affect your score. These types of inquiries – made by the consumer – are not available to scoring models and potential creditors. CHECK ALL YOU WANT.
FAQ – Why do regular inquires affect your score?
ANSWER: Well, say I go to Mercedes today and look to buy a $85,000 car, and I will finance through them about 70k of it. Okay, they check my credit (inquiry registered) and I leave with the car and 70k in new debt that isn’t on my credit report yet. It’s lunch time now, and I have 70k in new debt.
Tonight I go out for my new 65" LCD TV, and their is a no interest offer if I open a Best Buy charge. When Best Buy’s finance company pulls my report, they’d be insane not to play it safe and scale my score down considering that I was just at Mercedes Benz earlier in the day.
After a month or so, the Mercedes finance company should show up on my report, so after a month or so, the merc inquiry will have no effect. And If I went shopping to Mercedes, Lexus and Infiniti one weekend, those inquiries would be considered ‘duplicates’ – they just see me as shopping for a new car (one). They all would not temporarily lower my score. Just one would. Now, that is a bit of a risk assessment by creditors, and they lean in the consumers’ favor, because I really could have bought a Mercedes for me, a Lexus for my wife and and Infiniti for my mom.
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As to the lawsuit lady:* Equifax probably had a hard time keeping things off her report THAT WERE ALREADY removed. That is the key. I am sure they removed things, but the data furnishers (the banks etc that report data to the credit reporting agencies CRAs) send the data back again (and the CRAs screen to block it, but it gets very tricky when the Data Furnishers are RARELY ever held liable for what they report and the standards they maintain. The account data and the owner ID change when reported, and dammit, the account gets past the blocker. Add to that some hard headed people who couldn’t take the ladies case aside and give it speciall attention and BAM, Equifax is liable.