I lost a wallet in 1996 and was subsequently the victim of identity theft.
Someone using my name and a Bridgeport, CT address (I live in Brooklyn, NY) opened accounts with credit card and mail order companies. Some of these started to appear on my credit reports.By 2001 I had successfully had every one of them removed, including a bad debt the thief ran up at Fingerhut Corporation. Now, inexplicably, in 2005 the Fingerhut bad debt has resurfaced on my credit reports under Jefferson Capital, a collection agency.
This item has already, in the last month, been responsible for the raising of the interest rate on two of my credit cards. I can find no phone number to call Jefferson Capital. I've tried in vain to have this item re-investigated and removed from my credit reports. I'm going to have to contact Fingerhut all over again; they gave me an extremely hard time back in refusing to provide me with the signature of whomever opened the account in my name so I could prove that the signature was not mine.
Between these two companies and the difficulty of contacting real human beings at the credit reporting companies I'm ready to (1) join anyone who is interested in a class-action suit against the credit reporting companies for disseminating prejudicial information purely on the unverified say-so of creditors, and (2) ditto against collection agencies and credit reporting companies that make themselves unavailable to field timely complaints about errors in their reporting.
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