Judgment Is Not Mine

Sorry about the repeated questions but I’m doing some heavy duty credit report correcting…

There’s a judgment that appears on my credit report by a Company. When I called the courthouse, they verified that this judgment was for my parents, not me. However, once I disputed the judgment, it was reported back through CreditBureau (the only bureau that reported this judgment for me) that it was validated.

This company has a reputation as a junk debt buyer. Is it illegal to report a debt as validated that is in fact not mine?

I’m running into the issue that I can’t get court documents because I’m not involved in the case, and I can’t get it removed from my credit because I don’t have any documentation from the court. Any ideas on how to remove this from my report?

Rick

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Hello Again Rick,

Credit Bureaus use contractors to obtain public records.  A company called ChoicePoint commonly gathers public record data and regularly supplies it to the CRA’s.  There’s no doubt that errors can occur in this process.

The National Consumer Law Center’s “Fair Credit Reporting” Fifth Edition (page 99) explains that in one instance in 1991, a contractor was sent to gather public records information for a town in Vermont to determine which property owners were delinquent on property taxes.  “The researcher sent to do the job copied down the wrong roll, and, as a result, all property owners in the town were reported delinquent on paying their property taxes”.

If need be, you should be able to obtain a copy of the judgment, although in my opinion, your contact at the courthouse is more valuable.  Send a CMRR letter to the CRA advising them of the name, title, and phone number of your courthouse contact and ask the CRA for their Method of Verification.

By the way, I am thankful for the questions because it’s so much easier to type a short answer than it is to create an article from scratch.  In addition, you may have asked the question, but there are thousands of other people that are looking for an answer to that same question and once it’s posted, it’s a resource for others.

This blog was started less than a year ago and we’ve already had thousands of people register their contact information with our website.  I am looking forward to contacting those registrants for the states in which we have a sponsoring mortgage company.  I’m curious about everyone’s progress or to see if people are stuck, and so on.  I wonder – in the past eleven months - how many cumulative points we’ve added to everyone’s credit score?

Here’s to your credit score.

Paul