Q. I’m doing some credit repair on my credit report in anticipation of buying a house. I noticed an account I don’t recognize on my credit report from American Express. This account is reporting me 30 days late 2 times in the last 2 years. I sent a letter to American Express and asked them for the records on the account listed on my reports. They sent me back this:
We are writing to confirm we received your recent inquiry. Unfortunately, we are not able to find your account in our systems, so we need more information from you to assist you with this request. We need your Social Security Number to process this request.
Do I send them this information? I got the account number from my Experian report , so I think it’s just missing the last four numbers. Thanks for your help.
A. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, consumers are able to directly send negative credit report information disputes to the companies who are reporting it. These companies are termed “information providers” in the law.
These investigation requests take the same form as a dispute with the credit bureau about an negative account. In the same way, if you send a request to a credit reporting agency to investigate a listing, you must provide some kind of proof that you are who you say you are. Credit reports contain all kinds of private, sensitive information and the public should be glad that even minimal steps to guard privacy are being taken by the credit bureaus.
If your name is common, and you couldn’t provide the whole account number to American Express, it’s quite possible that that they were not able to retrieve any information on an account in their records based on the information you sent. And rest assured, American Express can be trusted with your Social Security Number, as they are highly regulated by the banking industry (at least with regards to privacy).
What should you expect next? Upon receipt if an investigation request, an information furnisher is required by law to get back to you within 30 days with the results of the investigation. If they don’t, the negative information needs to be removed from your credit report.
Has this happened to any of you? Were the information providers able to verify negative information? Tell us about it!
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For quickest removal of the line item, you may be better off disputing the item with the CRAs, forcing them to contact AmEx about the item. (Start with the CRA your mortgage broker uses for your credit report) After all, if they can’t find it for you, they may not be able to find it for the CRA, and it should be automatically removed from your credit report(s). If the CRA does confirm the line item, then ask for method of verification and go from there. I wouldn’t start by “helping” AmEx “find” your account. Or, I would call AmEx only with your ssn, i.e. “I need help finding an old account” without revealing any account number that may or may not be yours. If they lost that information, so be it, it’s now an easier problem to solve. This site and creditboards.com has plenty of information on cleaning up your credit history and you should be well read on the convoluted process we have to go through and the underhanded techniques that creditors and collectors use before pressing ahead. Good Luck.
You always need to procure a copy of your credit report from Equifax, Experian, or Trans Union before starting with your credit repair activities.
We were talking about disputes with the original creditor here.