30 Days? Yah, Right!

Well, as of October 24, 2005, I had been monitoring my credit for over 30 days with no apparent corrections or changes to the Sherman/LVNV account. At this point, I decided to write another dispute to the credit bureau, figuring that my dispute fell on deaf ears.

Up ‘til now I’d been conducting more online research on credit reporting and was armed with a bit more information. I found out that although the Sherman/LVNV account appeared as a duplicate, that it was the WAY that they were reporting that was causing it to appear as a duplicate.

For one, they were reporting a pay history, and reported me 120 days late in March and April of 2003. For another, they were reporting that the account was currently “Open”, and they had reaged the date of last activity to 08/1999, instead of 07/1999. And lastly, they were reporting their account as a “Factoring Company Account”, and a LOAN to boot. Their account was also appearing as an "OTHER" account on my credit report (as opposed to being located in the collections section of my credit report) and the balance was counted against my available credit balance, which was DEFINITELY not right.



So, I figured another dispute to pinpoint specific problems with the account would be in order. I logged online to www.equifax.com and submitted an online dispute. Among my disputes, I included the fact that the account should be reporting as CLOSED, that the date of last activity should be reporting as 7/1999, and that these guy were NOT a factoring company, they were junk debt buyers. I hit the send button on my dispute and wait some more...

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...