Good Article On $100,000 Verdict For False Credit Reporting
Christine at the always interesting "2007 Credit Suit" site has a nice article about Robert Brennan's recent verdict against Arrow Financial Services. This case dealt with problems that many Alabama residents are fighting - debt collectors who falsely put information on credit reports.
We fight this using several laws - the Fair Credit Reporting Act, Alabama state law (defamation, invasion of privacy, negligence, etc), and against debt collectors/debt buyers the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act which prohibits false entries on your credit report. We'll write more about this later but take a look at this article on Christine's site - it does us all good to see the good guys winning. We've met Robert at some consumer conferences and he definitely seems like a good guy....
Here's a brief excerpt:
Ms. Nelson previously sued Arrow in 2003 over the account, and part of the settlement of that case included a permanent removal from her credit reports. However, literally as she was signing the settlement agreement from the previous lawsuit, Arrow began re-reporting the account to Equifax, one of the “big three” credit bureaus, using a different account number. When Ms. Nelson later disputed the account’s re-appearance to Equifax, Equifax could not locate the account because it had been re-reported with a different account number. Ms. Nelson then brought the lawsuit.
You can't make this stuff up - what we see debt collectors doing just boggles the mind....
