I got a car loan in 2005. I was making ridiculous money after Hurricane Katrina and was pretty much socking away anywhere from $400-600 extra towards principle a month. I was able to use this to buy my house because I literally had no credit. Lost that job and credit went to shit, but I made all my car payments. I was late MAYBE 4 times. Fastforward to 2008, I get a new job that pays me well and I'm starting to rebuild my credit. I start making extra payments towards my car again and wind up paying it off 9 months early. It's showing up as a negative on all 3 credit reports. My car loan was through my bank, who even told me on the phone they dont show any late payments. I've disputed online and over the phone and they will do nothing because they swear according to their records i made late payments. My bank says they will clear it off my account if the CRA's get in touch with them, but they won't. They stop at the first step and are just like nope, won't remove it, you were late! How do I get this negative off my report?
Have you tried disputing them through the CRAs? If your bank is telling you the truth about not reporting late pays, the CRAs will contact them regarding your dispute and they won't be able to verify them through the bank. If you can't get them deleted that way, your only other option is to work directly with your lender to convince them to remove the negative marks.
I called an spoke to someone at the dispute center for one of the CRA's who refused to even contact my bank and was very rude. He said according to them, I was late and they would do nothing about it. I tried disputing it online through the CRA's website and they are always closed with no resolution
Then it sounds like the bank was feeding you a line about not reporting late pays. Many banks won't report a single late pay, but if you have multiple late pays they generally aren't as lenient. You said you had 4, which would lead me to believe they started reporting because you were consistently late. It sounds like your best option at this point might be working directly with the bank and trying to convince them to remove the negative marks based upon that fact that you were a good customer, paid off the loan completely, blah blah blah. They don't have to do anything, but you may find the right person and get lucky.
