Identity Theft and Your FICO

State: Missouri re: 9 credit cards and 2 installment loans
In 2001, I received an eye-opener. I applied for a mortgage loan and discovered that â??Iâ? had 16 open accounts! Well, 5 of them were actually mine and they were â??paid as agreedâ?? and in full. The other 11, totaled $67,335 and all of them were listed as collection and/or charged off accounts.

I took the credit report to an attorney who said it wasnâ??t worth the time, money or effort, since â??they would all fall off my record pretty soon anyway.â?
The last one is due to drop off in July 2004.

In case youâ??re wondering, I got the mortgage loan, but at 10.75% and in light of today's interest rates, I decided I didnâ??t want to wait until all these drop off to apply for a refinanced loan at a better rate.

I started reading this website and others and on August 25, 2003, I wrote my first validation letter to each creditor listed.

I received ZERO responses from any of them.

On September 29, 2003, I wrote my first validation letters to the CRAâ??s.

To date, 8 have either been dropped by the company or the CRA for whatever reason.
One has been â??reviewedâ?, whatever that means, and the other 2 were â??verifiedâ?? and each remains on my report. Two credit cards and one installment loan.

I followed up those 2 with the letter requesting how they were validated when I was never provided with any validation. Those letters went to both the companies themselves and to the CRAâ??s.

To date, I have received no response, but then again, that was only last week.

It has cost me about $170.00 in postage and about $150.00 for credit reports online, plus my time and effort, but I consider it well worth it.

When I last checked, my FICO score was 672, but that was before the 8 bad debts were removed. Iâ??m waiting for all the paperwork to catch up before paying for new reports.

After all I have read, I consider myself quite lucky, but I donâ??t want to rest on that.

A lawsuit notwithstanding, what exactly is my next step?

I really donâ??t want to be like the person who had a dozen more appear after I worked so hard to get the others cleared!

PS.I have OPTOUTâ??d and inserted a fraud alert statement.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I've done or tried all of that.

But, you mean to tell me that, after all this expense, time and trouble, it's done for nothing?

Removing items belonging to you ruins your FICO if they are old?

There's got to be something wrong here!