Hacker News Reader

Comment by daniel-thompson | Hacker News Reader

A grey-hat method of dealing with this would be to dispute it with Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian and choose a plausible dispute reason ("I never knew about it" or whatever). Regardless of the merits of the claim, it's likely their "investigation" will resolve in your favor and they'll just remove it (and your score will bounce back immediately).

It doesn't necessarily feel great... but remember that you're literally just a number that they couldn't care less about.

View on HN

When I was going through the mortgage process, my broker recommended a credit repair company, whom I learned had three broad purposes (the reason I mention this is in point three):

1. Relieve the psychological / emotional stress of debt collectors hounding you by redirecting that to them.

2. Offering to settle debts. Realize, though that "Paid in full" and "Settled in full" are different statuses to a CRA. And both have an entirely negligible impact on improving your credit score - the damage is done when the negative tradeline is reported. HOWEVER, for mortgages, there's some merit in resolving this. "Yes, it got to that point, but I did take care of it" is better that "Yes, it got to that point, and then I continued to ignore it."

3. How do these agencies also "improve" your credit? They dispute every negative tradeline, regardless of accuracy. If the tradeline isn't verified (because smaller/more manual agencies don't have the time/inclination, especially if they've got their money now), it is removed, like it never happened. If it IS verified? They dispute it again. And again. In the hope that at some point the creditor will fail to meet the verification requirements. Nothing magic.

If this doesn't work, submit another dispute around Thanksgiving - the creditors have 30 days to respond before it's automatically resolved in your favor. In my experience it does actually feel good to do this.

At some point, when a system is so broken and unjust, I think it's no longer unethical to exploit it given the opportunity

When was it ever just or working?

I doubt this would work. Credit reports are for lenders, and credit bureaus side with their true customer.

The FCRA requires them to prove you owe the debt. Debt collectors often can't do this, especially if your debt has been resold - these are often resold as an Excel spreadsheet.

YMMV but it's worked for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com