Every year I diligently request our free credit report, (unless we will be applying for a loan in which case I pay for the reports if need be)and begin the task of correcting the errors. They are usually corrected within 30days. However, almost every year, these same erroneous accounts creep back on the report!

This April we wanted to refinance our home, I pulled the reports that were corrected in August 2008, only to find that Trans Union had multiple wrong accounts listed again. I once AGAIN made the corrections in May 2009 only to find out as of last week (Aug 2009) one account has once again reared its ugly head. I now need to wait another 30 days to hopefully get this mess cleared.

Trans Union states it’s an error with the creditor, and of course the creditor always verifies the accounts are not ours and blames Trans Union.

I need to know WHAT to do! The notion that these things appear and multiply like rabbits in such a short amount of time is keeping me awake at night!

I have disputed, corrected, yelled, kicked and screamed to no avail.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I called TransUnion and spoke to someone in another country who was no help at all and more interested in selling me on credit protection (ha!). He said it was somehow my fault and I had to submit records providing all my history to them. That seemed pretty ludicrous and would’ve easily taken years.

So I finally enlisted the help of the reader advocate at Kiplinger’s who contacted someone much farther up the food chain at TransUnion. I provided the requested info, and lo and behold, they had all my info/history, but under other versions of my name. I replied that I thought the whole point of one unique Social Security Number was that it was the focal point for all the info – wouldn’t you figure a computer could search on the SSN and compile everything from that? Well, no, apparently it’s not compiled that way. My file with that agency is still not as complete as the other two and I don’t know why, but at least there’s enough info there on me now that this denial nonsense shouldn’t happen again.

Just a heads up if anyone else finds this to be the case…

Oh, and I was doing the recommended free credit report from each agency every year, but all that told me was that they had me and there were no negative marks. I didn’t realize that the lack of detail actually meant they didn’t have any detail linked to my SSN until the above situation clued me in. Now I’m much more careful to comb each report and check details.

Clearing it up was easier and more difficult than your example. I had some fun conversations with representatives that were confused about the problem:
Me: “Yes, my name is Daniel ….., and yes I lived at these addresses, but I’m Daniel W. ….., not Daniel C.”
Rep: “So you’re Daniel ….. Jr?”
Me: “No.”
Rep: “…”
Fortunately, I was able to send some court documents that listed the names of our entire family, as well as his birth date and social, to the credit bureaus which cleared it up and was a little less problematic than proving that I didn’t live here or there. I do still have at least one of my father’s old addresses on my credit report that I didn’t reside. He’s not with us anymore, so I’m not worried about any future confusion.

Lesson learned: I named my son something else.

I’m glad I watch my credit reports like a hawk, but now I’m not so sure what I would do if there was an error like this on one of them!

That sucks – you’d think USPS would have records that they could check against.