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Friday, December 08, 2006

A Dark Day...

Well, it all started out on September 22, 2005, when I pulled up my 3 credit reports from Suze Orman's FICO Kit at http://www.myfico.com/ . Upon reviewing my reports, I knew I was in WAY over my head! There were accounts that I didn't recognize and accounts that I knew were wrong, and personal information that was completely off-track.

The nice thing about Suze's package is that her online software will walk you through disputing any information on your report. Well, needless to say, I had quite a few disputes - one of which happened to be for a company listed on my report as LVNVFUNDG. The funny thing about it was that it appeared under the regular accounts section of my Equifax report (along with all of my currently revolving accounts) as an "Open" account that was 120+ days past due, and NOT in the collection accounts section.

So, I'm thinking to myself....this has got to be wrong (right?)....so I do a little investigation and come up with a sensible answer. This LVNVFUNDG is obviously making some sort of mistake in their reporting. Their reported "Credit Limit" matched a charged-off credit card balance dating back to a card from 1999. However, I never opened an account with LVNVFUNDG directly and the original creditor still appeared on my report. So, I figured they were just reporting the account as a current derogatory by mistake.

I took it upon myself to notify Equifax of their error via a letter [show 9/22 dispute letter] dated the same day, specifically stating that the LVNVFUNDG account must be a duplicate (since the original creditor still appeared). I have 30 days of waiting for my dispute results, so in the meantime I do a little investigating about this account holder and discover their name was really LVNV Funding LLC out of Houston, Texas and they were tied in some way to Sherman Acquisitions, LP. This was confirmed by pulling an online copy of my credit report directly from Equifax's website. This report showed a lot more detail and listed specific contact information for the data furnisher. Funny thing was that LVNV Funding was showing up as the account holder in the Summary [insert pg 3 from 10/13 rpt], but back where the account detail was it showed up as a Sherman Acquisition, LP account.....hmmmmm.

Being the detail-oriented person that I am, I send a letter [show 10/7 letter to Sherman] to Sherman Acquistion dba LVNV Funding (just to cover all the bases) at the Houston, Texas address listed on my report. Within the letter, I dispute the validity of the debt and requested that they either forward validation of the account to my attention, or delete the account off of my credit report. I figure that there's NO WAY this company could be in their right mind by reporting a collection account as something that is currently past due. It's gotta be an error that they will rectify just as soon as I let them know of their mistake. YEAH, RIGHT!

To be continued...

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