Long time lurker, hopefully you all can help me out.
I check Credit Karma regularly, and recently when my reports updated I saw that my Equifax had multiple collections accounts and derogatory marks (missed payments) that are NOT mine. There were also some hard credit inquiries that I had never seen before. They were not recent, however, all of the accounts had dates from ~2014-2016, most of it being from 2015.
After further investigation I saw under my personal information that there was a new name and addresses that were not mine as well - for anonymity's sake, we'll say my name is Jill Smith, and then I got married and changed my name to Jill Johnson. In addition to those two names, there was a new name, Nancy Richardson (not real), that obviously did not belong to me or anyone at all related to me.
This is just Equifax, not Transunion (still working on checking Experian). It seems to me that my credit history was somehow accidentally merged with someone else's, maybe as a computer or user error. My guess is that we may have similar social security numbers (which may or may not lend plausibility to this idea), because I know she lives in the same state/general area I grew up in from the addresses on file and the inquiries that have city names in the business name. I do not live in the same state, and have not for some time, which adds to my feelings that this was some sort of computing error.
I filed a dispute on all of the items individually, including the wrong names and addresses, as well as the collections accounts and derogatory marks. I followed up my dispute with Equifax on the phone, and they put a 90 day fraud alert on my account just in case this is related to identity theft.
Here's my problem: the results of my dispute are in, and Equifax has not deleted everything wrong from my report. They still show me as being Jill Johnson AND Nancy Richardson.
I have tried to view my report online to file another dispute with Equifax, but I cannot pass the verification questions because it's asking me to verify information on my credit report, which is obviously incorrect. Whenever I go to their website now, after I input personal information it says that my request cannot be processed, and to call them to resolve. So it appears I've been locked out. In a follow up call with Equifax, they said they could not help me with those issues with the online access because I don't pay for their account subscription every month. So I'm not able to file disputes online, and I have to do them over the phone. I was sent a copy of my credit report in the mail so that I can find the items I need to dispute if I call back in.
The representative at Equifax was not able to give me information about why my original credit dispute did not resolve this information issue.
I have no idea what to do next. I don't have any information on why my original dispute did not get resolved, and I don't know what the merit will be in submitting another dispute over the same information if the first wasn't accepted. I feel as though there must be something else I need to do, but I have gotten no help or guidance from Equifax when I've called.
Are there steps I should be taking that I haven't already? Do I just need to submit the disputes via phone and hope they eventually resolve them? This has obviously drastically affected my Equifax credit score, because of the credit issues this other person has had, and while I'm lucky to be in a position right now where I'm not trying to do anything credit related at the moment, I know this needs to be resolved.
TL;DR: Equifax thinks I'm someone I'm not and is not removing their bad credit history from my report.
Edited for clarity.
Submitted May 21, 2017 at 03:06PM by wellthisiskj http://ift.tt/2q76zTc
