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Originally Posted by Trish  Have you tried filing complaints? |
If I thought it would help, I would, but I'm tired of fighting them. Truthfully, I'm very doubtful that filing complaints will yield any results in this case, since I've seen many who've gone this route over far more serious violations in the past year, and the CRAs simply answered the complaint to the FTC and/or State AGs with a "we have no idea who this person is, and so we need more information to investigate" or something similar. The CRAs know the FTC is basically toothless unless they get a mountain of consumer complaints and are forced to act. And most state AG's won't touch the complaints, either. I've read a lot on other forum boards over the past few years, and I see a shift in consumer complaints no longer being effective on minor violations.
This BK will be off in another year or so, and there's no use in pursuing any more disputing at this point, after almost a year of zero results.
My point of following up with my experience (which many fail to do) is: the original game plan of getting the court "we don't verify" letter, sending it in demanding deletion after a verified dispute result, and expecting it to be enough to yield a BK deletion appears to be dead in the water. 1.5 or 2 years ago, this seemed to work very well, but not any longer.
I attacked this BK from multiple angles, and I know my disputes were read by individuals and not just processed by automation (adding script-writing fonts and boxed items in my disputes effectively stopped scanning and automate processing, and the "tone" of the CRA replies to disputes changed dramatically). I just feel things have shifted a bit, as they always do with certain techniques eventually being ineffective. The CRAs monitor most credit boards...they know people are using certain methods effectively in disputes, so they're probably rendering them ineffective by training their CSRs to ignore many of these approaches, such as CC'ing the FTC, etc...in dispute follow-ups. In a word, they're calling our bluffs and daring us to litigate.
I'll say, of my own accord, that I can never see myself ramping it even further to ligitation. I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of litigating against the CRAs for FCRA violations, on the grounds of reporting incorrectly...such as a BK's docket number is missing some digits, or the BK filing date says 7/01/00 when it should be 7/20/00. Any self-repecting judge, if it got that far, would throw one out on their ear, and probably charge them court costs for the frivolous lawsuit. And the threat of litigation or a lawyer-originated letter for some minor violation, while once effective, has been overused to the point of rendering it ineffective.
If anyone has some concrete examples of tough BK removal success beyond a simple dispute and getting lucky, I want to see it. I'd love to see examples complete with deletion letters. Show me court filings yielding success, or court letters like we discussed above resultin in deletions, or other proof in the past year that they can anonymously share online (not just some "oh I got it to work" cheap talk). I simply no longer believe what some post online about their success (I mean the past year; not in the good ole days). Having said that, I would love to be proven wrong.
Sorry to say, I've fought the good fight, and I'm all used up in disputing this BK. :o