Credit Repair Companies

R Q

R Q

Well-Known Member
Joined
Apr 4, 2005
Location
Charlotte
I have someone asking me for advice because their credit had issues years ago but there are items on their report that he didn't do and isn't aware of. He's considering using a credit repair company and I said that I am sure they are scams. But I don't have any personal experience with them. Do any of you have experience with them and how can you research and repair your own credit when you know some of the history is wrong?
I'm looking for avenues to help.
Thanks
 
I'm sure they are probably scam but no history of using them myself either.
If they aren't a scam they are pretty much doing what you can do your self but charging you for the Knowledge and time.


I know you can contact the creditor to dispute charges, and negotiate payoff yourself, just don't make promises you can't keep because if you do I'm sure you'll be in worse position than previously. Todays interest rates I can't imagine how difficult it would be to work out of debt. It isn't an instant repair it takes Month/years I'm sure.

All things you probably know, just a quick Google search and here is something from the FTC supporting statements above.


and from Experian
www.experian.com

How to Repair Your Credit in 11 Steps

You can repair your credit by following these 11 steps, including checking your credit, fixing credit report errors and setting up autopay.
www.experian.com www.experian.com


All can be done by yourself just takes a lot of leg work.
I'll shoot you a text of a common friend that may have some experience due to his ex wife.
 
I know some of the shady guys I used to work with had terrible credit. Whenever they wanted to buy something, they would hire some guy to "fix" their credit. If I remember correctly, they said the guy just disputed everything on their credit report that was causing issue. They said that their credit score went up while he was disputing everything. They would do what they wanted to do and then their score would crash back down, as all the disputed charges were found legitimate. No idea if that's the general business model for most credit repair places, or if that's just the one that those guys were after 🤷‍♂️
 
Years ago the wife and I used to lead financial planning classes at our old church through the Ramsey Financial Peace program.
Through that I have had a bit of experience with the, helping others.

There are some good ones out there. I am sure there are some scams as well.

However, none of them do anything that you cant do yourself.

The process, as I remember it, is easy enough but tedious.
-First you have to treat each of the 3 credit bureaus as individuals - and check each. If an item is on multiple bureaus you will have to file separate disputes with each bureau.
(In case they dont know the 3 are equifax, transunion, and experian)
- You can create a log in for each, request 1 free pull per year. Then there are online steps that detail how to do disputes. When we were doing it al disputes had to be in writing snail mail....I believe you can do so electronically now.
- Once you file a dispute they contact the creditor and the creditor has to respond within 30 days. If the creditor doesn't respond within 30 days they have to remove the item.
- In my experience less is more. If you give details about why and how they will nit pick and prove one detail and the whole charge will remain. if you just say - this is an invalid report. or this isnt mine. We had probably an 80% success rate.
- If they reject your appeal, its free just protest again. Eventually you will win by default.
- One note...private debt dies in 5-7 years depending on the state and the type. Any payment or negotiation resets the clock. So if they have a 6 year old debt and they cant pay....dont set up payment plans, that will keep it on their report for 7 additional years.


There are also some tricks to raise your score rapidly and freely.

One of the easiest, if the person with the issue has a good friend, who has good credit. There is what's known as a slide along hack. Some credit card companies, notably all AMEX, attach the good of a primary holder to anyone who is issued a secondary card, but not the reciprocal. So for example. If you have a friend with an 800+ credit score and they have an AMEX. They can order an additional card for the person with a bad score. The bad score person will get the account age and payment history for that card which will help their score. However none of the bad of person receiving the card goes to primary holder.

There used to be a whole network and several forum communities dedicated to credit repair who would do this. Personally, I myself have done it to help friends/family. What it looks like is I would log into AMEX order an additional card for someone. Enter their info and SSN and stuff and get them a card on my account. As soon as the card is issued they would get the 20 year history and 100% on time payments of my card on their report and it would boost their score. If you or someone you know does this, make sure and dont actually give the problem child the card, or you are responsible for the charges. I would just order the card, shipped to my house. Then destroy it when it arrived. Importantly I would never give the card company real contact info for the person I was helping to prevent them from requesting a replacement card in case they figured out how to.

If this last piece is of interest, let me know and I will be glad to expand and deep dive on it.
 
Last edited:
Ron said:
Years ago the wife and I used to lead financial planning classes at our old church through the Ramsey Financial Peace program.
Through that I have had a bit of experience with the, helping others.

There are some good ones out there. I am sure there are some scams as well.

However, none of them do anything that you cant do yourself.

The process, as I remember it, is easy enough but tedious.
-First you have to treat each of the 3 credit bureaus as individuals - and check each. If an item is on multiple bureaus you will have to file separate disputes with each bureau.
(In case they dont know the 3 are equifax, transunion, and experian)
- You can create a log in for each, request 1 free pull per year. Then there are online steps that detail how to do disputes. When we were doing it al disputes had to be in writing snail mail....I believe you can do so electronically now.
- Once you file a dispute they contact the creditor and the creditor has to respond within 30 days. If the creditor doesn't respond within 30 days they have to remove the item.
- In my experience less is more. If you give details about why and how they will nit pick and prove one detail and the whole charge will remain. if you just say - this is an invalid report. or this isnt mine. We had probably an 80% success rate.
- If they reject your appeal, its free just protest again. Eventually you will win by default.
- One note...private debt dies in 5-7 years depending on the state and the type. Any payment or negotiation resets the clock. So if they have a 6 year old debt and they cant pay....dont set up payment plans, that will keep it on their report for 7 additional years.


There are also some tricks to raise your score rapidly and freely.

One of the easiest, if the person with the issue has a good friend, who has good credit. There is what's known as a slide along hack. Some credit card companies, notably all AMEX, attach the good of a primary holder to anyone who is issued a secondary card, but not the reciprocal. So for example. If you have a friend with an 800+ credit score and they have an AMEX. They can order an additional card for the person with a bad score. The bad score person will get the account age and payment history for that card which will help their score. However none of the bad of person receiving the card goes to primary holder.

There used to be a whole network and several forum communities dedicated to credit repair who would do this. Personally, I myself have done it to help friends/family. What it looks like is I would log into AMEX order an additional card for someone. Enter their info and SSN and stuff and get them a card on my account. As soon as the card is issued they would get the 20 year history and 10% on time payments of my card on their report and it would boost their score. If you or someone you know does this, make sure and dont actually give the problem child the card, or you are responsible for the charges. I would just order the card, shipped to my house. Then destroy it when it arrived. Importantly I would never give the card company real contact info for the person I was helping to prevent them from requesting a replacement card in case they figured out how to.

If this last piece is of interest, let me know and I will be glad to expand and deep dive on it.
Click to expand...
Thanks Ron. I'm just taking it all in at this point. Trying to keep them from going down worse paths and digging in deeper with a scam company.
 
Ron said:
Years ago the wife and I used to lead financial planning classes at our old church through the Ramsey Financial Peace program.
Through that I have had a bit of experience with the, helping others.

There are some good ones out there. I am sure there are some scams as well.

However, none of them do anything that you cant do yourself.

The process, as I remember it, is easy enough but tedious.
-First you have to treat each of the 3 credit bureaus as individuals - and check each. If an item is on multiple bureaus you will have to file separate disputes with each bureau.
(In case they dont know the 3 are equifax, transunion, and experian)
- You can create a log in for each, request 1 free pull per year. Then there are online steps that detail how to do disputes. When we were doing it al disputes had to be in writing snail mail....I believe you can do so electronically now.
- Once you file a dispute they contact the creditor and the creditor has to respond within 30 days. If the creditor doesn't respond within 30 days they have to remove the item.
- In my experience less is more. If you give details about why and how they will nit pick and prove one detail and the whole charge will remain. if you just say - this is an invalid report. or this isnt mine. We had probably an 80% success rate.
- If they reject your appeal, its free just protest again. Eventually you will win by default.
- One note...private debt dies in 5-7 years depending on the state and the type. Any payment or negotiation resets the clock. So if they have a 6 year old debt and they cant pay....dont set up payment plans, that will keep it on their report for 7 additional years.


There are also some tricks to raise your score rapidly and freely.

One of the easiest, if the person with the issue has a good friend, who has good credit. There is what's known as a slide along hack. Some credit card companies, notably all AMEX, attach the good of a primary holder to anyone who is issued a secondary card, but not the reciprocal. So for example. If you have a friend with an 800+ credit score and they have an AMEX. They can order an additional card for the person with a bad score. The bad score person will get the account age and payment history for that card which will help their score. However none of the bad of person receiving the card goes to primary holder.

There used to be a whole network and several forum communities dedicated to credit repair who would do this. Personally, I myself have done it to help friends/family. What it looks like is I would log into AMEX order an additional card for someone. Enter their info and SSN and stuff and get them a card on my account. As soon as the card is issued they would get the 20 year history and 10% on time payments of my card on their report and it would boost their score. If you or someone you know does this, make sure and dont actually give the problem child the card, or you are responsible for the charges. I would just order the card, shipped to my house. Then destroy it when it arrived. Importantly I would never give the card company real contact info for the person I was helping to prevent them from requesting a replacement card in case they figured out how to.

If this last piece is of interest, let me know and I will be glad to expand and deep dive on it.
Click to expand...
Won't adding someone with bad credit history to a person with good credit history drag the credit history down?
 
Credit score is a biotch: hard to increase easy to decrease

If there is anything questionable on any of the three reports, contest them individually with each agency (like said above they are three different companies so you need to treat them individually). Now if there is legit negative things in there. It depends on the age as to if they can be “expunged” or not.

From my experience the “fix your credit now” companies are scams and I wouldn’t trust them.
 
R Q said:
Won't adding someone with bad credit history to a person with good credit history drag the credit history down?
Click to expand...
No.
You aren’t adding the bad to your credit history.
You are just adding the credit card to theirs. And the good history of the cc attaches to the card holders report. It’s doesn’t link their other history to you.
 
The reputable credit repair services that aren’t scams do exactly what Ron outlined above on your behalf. They contract with individuals that have very high credit scores to put their clients on as additional card holders to get that credit boost, which is mainly used to lower interest rates for big ticket purchases or debt consolidation loans. After the loan for the big ticket purchase or the debt consolidation loan is closed, then they remove that person as a card holder from the individual’s account with the high credit score. The contracted individual with the high credit score gets paid a flat rate for each child account attached to himself.
 
Fwiw when we were leading FPU - I’ve raised a credit score from the 520s to the low 700s in 60 days.

Now if there are repossessions or evictions or bankruptcy….all bets are off forget about it.

But you can literally dispute a file item because a date is wrong or an address is mid spelled. You aren’t disputing her debt is yours, just that the file item is 100% accurate.

It takes time. But we used to do an exercise where we showed the mortgage rate difference between the two scores, then annualized the cost. Then the hours spent ….it was almost always more than the client made per hour .
Then the message is - this is work, this is a second job. Treat it like one
 
I repaired my own credit after a bankruptcy and foreclosure.

pulled credit report and disputed anything I didn't agree with

Got a pre paid credit card for 300$. used for fuel and some beers here and there. paid it off every month. did this for about a year. then applied for a paypal credit. used it and paid it every month. year or so later I get a regular credit card, made sure there were not annual fees. Use it and pay it off every month. this method consumes time but it takes time for repair. I would never use a credit repair service, especially is they have an India accent..
 
grapehead said:
Any idea how much? My friend's credit is stupid high and he ain't using it.
Click to expand...
I was playing around with the idea of doing this myself pre-covid, so consider that these numbers are old and my memory isn’t the best, but IIRC it was in the $100-$150 range per client and they would only hold the child account open for 30-60 days. The number of child accounts you could have depended on the credit card’s rules, but you could do it on multiple cards at the same time. It was possible to pull in $1500+ per month if you managed it well.
 
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