I just found this board and thought I'd post something that I found out about a year ago. I was contacted by a CA who had an erroneous collection account with me. After explaining to him why it wasn't valid and that he was welcome to validate it himself he told me that it wouldn't be necessary and he had multiple problems with them. He agreed to remove it from my CR with all 3 CRA's. Being that I had a CA on the phone that was very nice, I took some time to query him about his day-to-day business. He stated the credit bureaus are now doing validations/verifications via email and that he very seldom gets postal mails from the CRA's. Being a computer security expert, this bothers me because under most circumstances the protocols used for email exchanges between servers (SMTP) provide no means for proper authentication. Therefore, it's altogether likely that your credit information is being sent across an unsecure medium or that the information being provided for validation wouldn't hold up in court. So my question is, has anyone else heard this? Thanks, WH
So little information is actually provided by the CRA to the CA to verify, that the main problem to the consumer is getting adequate information from the consumer's dispute thru the CRA to the CA to get erroneous information removed, despite the FCRA requirement that the CRAs consider information provided by the consumer. The credit reporting systems were originally set up to hold consumers responsible, and limit liability to the CRAs and DFs, and those mechanisms are still ingrained in both the FCRA and the CRA dispute procedures. Look up E-OSCAR and Metro-2.
