subject: Clean Credit Up - How Credit Collection Companies Abuse Your Rights [print this page] Taking the necessary steps to clean credit up can sometimes be confusing. You can pick up one manual and it tells you to start with one tactic. You pick up another and it tells you to take another route. Needless to say, it's confusing enough just to read the report.
I'm going to discuss one technique I effectively used to clean credit up and improve the history creditors are looking at now. I started by running my credit report. I didn't really want to spend the money on it but I needed to know what was on my credit report in order to know what to I was going to be cleaning up. I was aware of some of the accounts but I wasn't prepared for all the pages I received when I ran it.
The last time I had ran a report I got about 5 pages, in total. This time around, I got about 8 pages. If I had applied for a bunch of accounts I wouldn't have been surprised. Except that I've always been careful about my credit. I hit a bump on the road for a while and wasn't able to pay. What I found on those other pages were many collection companies making attempts to collect from me the accounts I had with the original creditors.
Now here's where the technique to clean credit up comes into play.
When I reviewed the report, I could clearly make out who the original lender was an all the accounts. On my report, I found what looked like duplicate accounts with different company names. So I thought. What I learned, thanks to having good information on my side, was that those duplicate account were collection companies making attempts to collect. There's no problem with collection companies trying to collect, except for when they violate your rights.
Collection companies were hired by the original creditor to collect on the debt I had on the accounts. There would be no problem with it except for the fact that they were re-aging my bad account. Re-aging is a violation of your rights, as I found out. The re-aging of debt is a violation of your rights because it extends the damage of your credit history than what is legally allowed. The credit collecting company has to honor the two, three or six months your creditor attempts to collect from you. If the start the clock any time after the original date. You have a candidate for removal.
To clean credit up you have to find the openings companies leave behind. Understanding their rules and playing by them helps. Their violation of my rights, though it doesn't impact me that much, allowed me the opportunity to dispute the accounts and effectively remove them from my credit report.
