Folsom woman says credit reporting agency refuses to remove debt belonging to someone else | Call Kurtis
FOLSOM — A Folsom viewer said a credit reporting agency is refusing to remove a debt that isn't hers. She reached out to CBS13 and the Call Kurtis consumer investigative team to look into this for her, so we have.
First, how often do you check your credit report? Our CBS13 viewer, Thu Nguyen, noticed a dental debt for a dentist she never heard of. As a result, the disparaging debt brought down her credit score. Like Nguyen's situation, chances are you have a mistake on your credit report, too.
Nguyen takes pride in her nearly perfect credit score.
"I feel like it's my pride to have a good credit," she said.
However, she received an alert that her score plunged because of a $15,000 debt to a dental office.
We asked Nguyen if she'd ever heard of this dentist before or had ever been to that dentist.
"No", she said.
Nguyen found mistakes on her credit report before, and with each, a simple challenge got them fixed. But this time, four different challenges with credit reporting agency TransUnion were denied, saying the debt was "verified as accurate."
"I feel insulted," Nguyen said.
"A lot of the errors people find with other people's information gets crossed with theirs, and sometimes they have similar names or similar Social Security numbers," said Lisa Gill, an investigative reporter with Consumer Reports.
Consumer Reports and WorkMoney found that nearly half of credit reports may contain errors, which could cause you to pay higher interest rates when you take out a loan if approved at all. Gill said you can check your credit report for free once a week at AnnualCreditReport.com—and while you can dispute an error online, she advised for legal reasons to go a step further.
"If you find any errors, pull all your documentation together, write a letter, print it out, print all of this out, make copies and send it by certified mail to each of the three credit bureaus," Gill said.
Here's more on what to do when checking your credit.
Nguyen ended up hiring an attorney who didn't get results for her, so we simply emailed our contact at TransUnion who wouldn't tell us what went wrong, but fixed it, saying, "This account is no longer on the credit report".
Nguyen told CBS13 that it turned out that the person who really owed the money shared a similar name. With the debt gone, Nguyen's credit is pristine again.
"Wow, so it was because of your power and your well-known something. That's why they were afraid of you. That's why they did it," she said. "So OK, my message to everybody is when they have a problem, call Kurtis."
So what do you do if you can't get an error fixed? File a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
You can also consider suing.
If you have a consumer problem, CBS13 and the Call Kurtis consumer investigative team are here for you. Go to CBS13.com/CallKurtis and fill out our form.