HSBC Watch News Release Forum Index
Forum Name: - Impact - Survival
Topic Title: Household Incompetent in 1997
Thu May 26, 2005 11:32 pm
Third party collection agencies are nasty, rude, mean people to deal with. We have cleared our credit records at least four times now and dealt with 14 collection agencies so far. These previously cleared accounts kept re-appearing in our reports. Even the third party collection agencies practice re-cycling. My wife has had one account re-cycled 6 times through different third party collection agencies.
I have had one re-cycled four times through the same third party collection agency. This is for an account that was opened over the phone to buy an Oreck vacuum cleaner and financed by Household Bank. This fraud account was first cleared from my credit report in 1997 in spite of the rudeness of the Household Bank representative. After it was cleared from my credit report. It reappeared as an account with Gulf States Credit in Atlanta, GA. They have provided me with two written clearances and one verbal clearance. It was again removed from my credit report.
Guess what? It just reappeared on my latest Equifax credit report. This is a never-ending struggle that has no end in sight.
How can this happen? In our opinion, there is a complete lack of accountability of the creditor and the credit-reporting agency. As long as a social security number is provided, there seems to be no effort to properly identify an applicant or to even insure that all of the required information is provided in the application.
Some copies of applications that we received were not even completely filled in. This did not inhibit approval by the creditor or the false information being accepted by the credit-reporting agency. The credit reporting agencies didn't even bother to question the very obvious changes to long established personal data. Even a check on the issue date of the social security number and the birth date, when provided by the applicant, would have eliminated most of our fraud accounts.
When the account goes bad, the creditor or a third party collection agency suddenly discovers the correct information in the credit report to locate us and begin their harassment. In our opinion, the person opening the fraud account, the creditor and the credit reporting agency are all co-conspirators and equally guilty of fraud.
A representative of a major credit reporting agencies once told us that they did not have time to check the accuracy of the information provided by their clients. There is absolutely no concern shown by them that their lack of even providing the most rudimentary check for authenticity of the information received in an application is wrecking our lives and the lives of many people throughout the country.
We monitor customer trends for possible violations of Regulation Z and other possible illegal actions.