Transcription
Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, how exactly were you able to verify the bankruptcy with LexisNexis if LexisNexis just said that they deleted it from my credit file?
What's up guys, welcome back to Keeping It Real with Credit. I'm Giovanna, and this is the Credit Corner. I'm the office manager and Senior Dispute Strategist over at Dispute Nation. And on this show, we're going to talk about everything when it comes to disputes and strategies so that you can learn what goes into the credit repair process. So that whether this is something that you want to do on your own, or you want to hire us to take on these negative items for you, you can understand how the credit repair process truly works.
So on today's episode, I'm gonna talk to you guys about how we were able to help one of our clients get a bankruptcy removed. I declare bankruptcy, and I get asked all the time, "Can bankruptcies be taken off of credit reports?" My answer to that is always, if it's on the credit report, it's subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Which means that if an item is inaccurate, or you want to challenge the information that's reporting, you have a right as a consumer to dispute it with the bureau. And remember that if an item is inaccurate, unverifiable, or incomplete, it must be corrected or removed.
So this particular client, he specifically reached out to us because this bankruptcy was holding him back. He wanted this removed from his credit report because his scores had plummeted after he had filed for bankruptcy. The biggest plummet since the crash of '29. So I'm gonna show you the exact steps that we took to help our client. And again, you can follow these steps on your own, or you can reach out to us for more help. But I want to show you that yes, it's true, bankruptcies can be deleted from credit reports.
So the very first thing that you want to go ahead and do is request a copy of your credit report from LexisNexis. And I'm going to explain to you why. In the past, when it came to disputing bankruptcies from credit reports, normally people would go to the courts first and they would send a dispute letter to the court asking if they verified information with credit reporting agencies. And yes, in the past, that did work because when you disputed the bankruptcy with the three major credit bureaus, they would respond back and list the source of information as the court. So if you did not know, the courts don't provide any information to the bureaus when it comes to public records. So you could use that letter from the court and send it back to the bureau and say, "Well, how did you verify this information with the court if I just reached out to them myself and they said that they don't give you any information?" Court is this dialogue relevant to anything? Yeah, it worked in the past, but things changed. And now when you dispute, they're gonna send back the response saying that they verified the information with LexisNexis. So that's why you want to go straight to LexisNexis, because again, that is where the bureau is getting the public record information from.
So I've pulled up here on my computer LexisNexis so that I can show you how you can go ahead and request a copy of your credit report. All you're going to do is fill out this information here with your first name, your last name, your residential address. If your delivery address is not the same as where you're currently living, then you want to go ahead and check that box so that you can provide a different address. Now, if you do want to request your consumer disclosure report, you can check that box and request that as well. And finally, you have the option to request a description of procedure letter, which basically is a letter from LexisNexis that is personal to your dispute request and describes how they process disputes that you may have in the system. Again, that's optional. Once you've completed that information, you're going to go ahead and click submit request.
Now, our client received back his LexisNexis report, and I'm gonna pull that out for you now so that you can see what it looks like. So here we have the LexisNexis report. Something that is super important is that the report is not necessarily going to come as, you know, a full credit report. You're actually going to get a letter that is going to have a link where you can access the report, and that link expires in 30 days. So as you can see here, this was the custom link for this client's report. It tells you here, it's a one-time URL, expires in 30 days. And you also have a PIN that you need to enter on the website in order to access your credit report. So my advice is that once you access your report, make sure that you download the full PDF to your computer because you will not be able to access that link again after 30 days.
So we're just going to go ahead and scroll through this credit report. And as you can see, the identification records is the very first thing that pops up. So this is very interesting, and it's important for you to know. Take a look at how many names. This is just names that are reporting for this client. I've scrolled through several pages. I see a total of 49 records, and this is just name variations. So for example, you might have your name as, you know, John A. Doe on your Social Security, but the credit reporting agencies might have you as, you know, John Doe only. They might have you as John with a letter missing in your name. They might have your entire middle name spelled out when it should only be your initial. So keep in mind that when you're looking at your credit report, you might see multiple variations of your name. Come to our house, you get my wife's name right? You might also see addresses that are reporting that maybe you don't recognize, maybe you've never lived there, maybe you don't live there anymore. And that's really important to take a look at as well. So this specific client had a total of 48, 48 addresses reporting. And again, nobody is going to tell you this. The credit bureau isn't going to call you and tell you, "Hey, just want to give you a heads up, just a friendly reminder, you might want to take a look at your credit report because you have 50 names and 50 addresses reporting." And the reason why we want to make sure that we clean this up is because all of the names and addresses on your credit report are associated with accounts that are on your credit report. And that's what we wanted to make sure that we did with this specific client. And what we do for all of our clients is we want to make sure that any name or address that's tied to these accounts that are inaccurate, that we want to dispute, that are negative, we want to clean all of that personal information up first.
So I'm going to show you now what that personal information dispute letter looked like. So we sent this over to LexisNexis and we stated in this dispute letter, and it's about eight pages long, every single name and address that we wanted removed from the client's credit file. And you have to be very specific, right? You don't want to just send a dispute letter to the bureau and say, "Hey, my name is this, and just delete everything else that you have on file from me if it's not this, I don't want it on there," because you're not really telling them what you want removed, right? So maybe you have 15 names that are wrong, and maybe you have 20 addresses that are wrong, but because you didn't specify what specific names and addresses are incorrect, maybe they only remove two or three of them, right? So you want to make sure that you list exactly what it is that's wrong and why, and request that they remove that from your report. And then, as with any dispute that's going to the credit bureaus, you want to make sure that you include a copy of your ID, and you want to include a proof of address, right? And making sure that that proof of address is recent. And if you just want some clarification on what kind of documents you have to submit with your disputes, you can go on the credit bureau's website, and they will tell you exactly what documents need to be submitted to prove your identity to them. A joke, Jim.
So the next thing that you want to go ahead and do is freeze LexisNexis. And I'm going to pull that up for you right now. This is LexisNexis's opt-out form. So why, why do you want to go ahead and freeze LexisNexis? By suppressing your file with LexisNexis, this is going to prevent them from selling information. So again, where is the bureau getting their information from? They're getting it from a third party. They're getting it from LexisNexis. So we want to freeze and restrict access to that information so that it makes it more difficult for the credit bureau to verify the information with the source. And it's very simple to do the freeze. Once you're on the website, you're going to go ahead and click next. And as your opt-out reason, you want to select, "I do not want my information shared." And then just go ahead and click next, and you're going to fill out this information. And on the next page, you'll be able to enter your address as well. All right, and then you'll get a confirmation page at the end, and they usually will mail you a confirmation as well with a PIN in case you do need to unfreeze your file. You want to make sure you save that response that has the PIN for you to go back and unfreeze your file if you need to in the future. Passwords, please. Yankee Doodles.
So our next step that we did is that we requested the Pacer case summary. So let me talk to you a little bit about Pacer and what Pacer is. So Pacer is the Public Access to Court Electronic Records. This is where the actual court documents are located, and the reason why we go on Pacer is because we want to get a summary of the case. We want to be able to have access to the actual documents from the court and all the information that the court is reporting. So once you log in, normally I like to search by parties, but it's up to you. You can search by case. And they have some other options as well that you can search by, but I find that searching by parties is much more easy, easier to do. You can just put the last name and first name and then just go ahead and search. And then to ensure that you've selected the right person or yourself, you're going to want to make sure that that case number is accurate, and you'll be able to pull up the information. And I'm gonna show you now what that case summary looks like for this client.
So as you can see, it includes the office, the county, the date filed. It includes what type of bankruptcy, whether it was a Chapter 7, a Chapter 13. All of the information for the trustees will be there, the parties, the social security number, the attorney. This summary has everything regarding that case. And what you want to make sure to do is get a screenshot of this transaction receipt. Make sure that there's some sort of timestamp of when you requested that information. And I'll tell you why, because once you dispute with LexisNexis and it does not get removed off the first attempt, you're gonna have to continue to challenge the information factually, disputing the errors that are reporting. However, you want to make sure that you have some proof of when you requested that information because if for whatever reason the information gets updated, which it can happen, you have proof that they tried to update the information. So we always make sure to get a timestamp as proof of when we requested the case summary from Pacer.
So the next thing that you're going to want to go ahead and do is you're going to send your dispute over to LexisNexis. And I'm just going to pull up first, before I show you the dispute that we sent to LexisNexis, I want to show you what that looks like on the LexisNexis report. So if you remember from earlier, I showed you the public info, the personal information, and that showed all of the names and addresses. And if you continue scrolling further down the report, that's where you're going to be able to see the bankruptcy records. And I went ahead and redacted all of that information for you. But as you can see here, it's going to have this same information that is showing on Pacer. It's going to have the status of the bankruptcy, what type of chapter, what's the status of that. It's going to have the information for the attorney. So again, what you want to do is confirm, is the information that is on LexisNexis matching to what's on Pacer? In most cases, there's an error reporting. Every time I pull a Pacer and I pull up LexisNexis for one of my clients that has a bankruptcy, I always find something wrong. It can be something as insignificant as the chapter type, as the date being wrong, as the name of the attorney being wrong. There's usually some sort of information that's not accurate. And again, that's right there, that is what you need in order to justify that, "Hey, something is reporting inaccurately. I want to request a deletion because, again, FCRA, hello, learn better, learn your rules."
Now let's go ahead and pull up that dispute to LexisNexis. So client's information was at the top of the letter. We sent that over to LexisNexis, including the date, last four, date of birth. And we said, "To whom it may concern, I've recently been informed that there's negative, negative information reported by U.S. Bankruptcy Court, California, LA, in the file you maintain under my Social Security number. Upon ordering a copy of my credit report, I see an entry from this court listing with reference number filed in October 10, 2019." And super important, remember, bankruptcies can stay on your credit report for up to 10 years. Okay? So this bankruptcy was not going to come off of this client's credit report until 2029. So we were able to get that removed, that taken off of the client's credit report years before it was expected to fall off. So just think about how that holds you back, right? Having a bankruptcy on your report for 10 years. If you want to buy a house, if you want to get a car, if you want to get an apartment, whatever the case may be, anything you need to do with your with your credit, that bankruptcy is going to be on there for 10 years. So the letter says, "The entry with reference number filed in October 10, 2019, with this court appears to be inaccurate. Please verify and validate this information with the court and provide me with copies of any documentation associated with this account granting you authorization to report this information. Barring my signature, in the absence of any such documentation, my signature, I formally request that this information be immediately deleted from the credit file you maintain under my Social Security number. Best regards, Client Name."
All right, so once that dispute letter gets sent, remember, 30 days, we have to wait for them to respond back by law. That is the time that they have to complete their investigation. All right, and now I'm gonna show you that response that we got back from LexisNexis. And again, don't be discouraged if it doesn't come off on the first attempt, right? If it comes back verified the first time around, it's okay. You're gonna continue to challenge it. You're gonna note those errors that you're finding on Pacer. You're gonna be able to say, "Hey, this is what's wrong with this bankruptcy." So fortunately, on the first attempt, this got taken off. And I'm going to read this to you. This is from LexisNexis, dated October 13. It says, "Dear Client Name, Regarding the results of our reinvestigation. Thank you for your recent correspondence to LexisNexis Risk Solutions. LexisNexis completed its reinvestigation and reports its findings below. Please be advised that you may receive additional communications if you disputed other items in your LexisNexis file." And the first thing that's at the top, it says, "We have deleted information from our identification records based upon your dispute." So again, going back to the report, what was at the very beginning, identification records. This is proof that they removed personal information from this client's report that potentially was tied to this bankruptcy. And then it says here, "We have deleted information from our bankruptcy records. We have deleted information from our bankruptcy records based upon your dispute related to case number blank. Please contact the court directly if they need to update their records." Again, here's your proof. It can be removed if you do it the right way. And if you remove it from the source of the information, how is the bureau going to verify? Right?
So why you want this response and why this letter is so important is because the next thing that you're gonna go ahead and do is send your dispute to Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, or whichever bureau is reporting your bankruptcy. And if the bureau responds back and verifies the bankruptcy as accurate, they're more than likely going to report LexisNexis as their source of information. But you have your proof that it's not on your LexisNexis report. You have a letter from LexisNexis saying that they deleted that. So Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, how exactly were you able to verify the bankruptcy with LexisNexis if LexisNexis just said that they deleted it from my credit file? It's a win-win for Team Diesel.
I hope you found this information super helpful. If you have a bankruptcy that's currently reporting and you've already tried to dispute it on your own, what steps did you take? Do you need some extra help? Let me know in the comments. We would love to help you out. And if you have any other questions on any other type of account on the disputing process, then don't hesitate to reach out to us. All of our contact information is in the description below. And remember, we do offer free credit consultations. So you just have to make an appointment using the link below, and we'll be more than happy to talk to you about your credit. So if you like this video, make sure to give it a big thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you guys on the next episode of The Credit Corner.
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