Hi. I am new to this board and I have read through a ton of posts here, so my apologies if I am repeating questions already asked, but there are a lot of posts on here and I very easily could have missed it. I am trying to clean up my credit report and I have a lot of collection accounts and charge offs. I know I need to get the CAs off my report, but my question right now is how do I go about getting the original creditors to delete negative information off my CR since my account is now with a collection agency and there would be no benefit to them to do this as far as I can tell. Do I send a DV letter to them and hope they can't find my information even though it was apparently already verified with the CRA or is there a better route to go? I have already disputed the negative information with the CRAs, but so far all of them are showing "account information disputed by consumer, meets FCRA requirements. and nothing was deleted, so I'm trying to figure out what my next step would be. Thank you!
You can't DV the OC. The DV process only works with CAs. Are the OCs reporting charge offs? If so, there's not much you can do unless you settle the debts with the CAs first and then go back to the OCs and request that they delete the charge offs out of goodwill. Sometimes it works, but there's really nothing that requires them to do so. They have every right to leave the charge off, since that's exactly what it was for them. Have you received actual responses from the CRAs regarding your disputes yet?
This, unfortunately, is one of the sticking points of the whole system. In *theory*, and according to the letter of the law, if the CA fails to provide proof of the debt to the CRA within a reasonable timeframe, the CRA is required to remove the entry. However, it seems that the current thinking of the CRAs is that just putting that "disputed by consumer" notice on the entry is "good enough". Nobody can say for sure, but I'm willing to bet that those entries are still used when calculating your FICO score -- and by lenders considering you for credit.
Yes, I received a response from the CRA after I disputed the negatives and they just put a note on my credit report stating that account was disputed by consumer, meets FCRA requirements, but nothing was removed. And yes, the OC is reporting them as charged off on my credit report. So basically I can work with the CA's to remove the negative credit, but there's nothing I can do with the OC other than hope they will delete it out of the goodness of their heart? I guess I'll just try periodically disputing them and hope that at some point they don't get around to verifying it. Does anyone know what the CRA's actually do to verify this information? I'm just wondering if all they did was call the OC and ask if it was correct without requiring anything else or does the OC have to provide some type of information to them proving that the debt is mine? Sorry if I'm asking stupid questions or redundant ones... I'm just new to this and trying to get as much understanding of the process as I can.
The CRAs usually just submit a simple form through an online system they developed. As you can imagine, they process lots of disputes and are all about automation. In most cases they are not actually contacting the OC by the phone to verify anything. And yes- there's not much you can do about the OC's charge offs unless you can convince them out of the good of their hearts to remove them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
