A lot of credit repair businesses ask questions like “my client is not sure if the account was late” or “my client told me it was late but said to dispute it anyway”. What do you do with these items? Do you dispute them or leave them alone?
There are strategies you can utilize in order to have credit bureaus or creditors remove items from your client’s credit report regardless of accuracy, without telling lies. Before we get into the strategy, let’s take a look at five basic principles of credit repair:
1. You should never tell lies in dispute letters
2. Telling the truth is more powerful and effective
3. Credit repair involves using creative and truthful tactics:
a) Polite and courteous requests,
b) Requests for information, and
c) Deliberate and aggressive demands.
4. Credit repair involves utilizing several federal laws
5. Making false claims such as “this account is not mine,”
when it is the clients account, is illegal per the CROA and FACT Act
A credit repair tactic is anything that is used to dispute the current credit items status. So let’s say your client has an account that is reported as 30 days late, and you send a dispute letter to the credit bureaus to challenge the late status. That is a credit repair tactic.
Tactics include credit bureaus disputes, original creditor disputes, goodwill adjustment requests, information requests and debt validations … to name a few.
Back to our premise, you can dispute items truthfully regardless of the accuracy. You might be wondering how the heck can do that without telling lies.
Let’s say your client has a charge-off account that truly was charged-off, how would you dispute that? It could be the difference between says “Chase credit card account #233232 is not my account” compared to saying “Please provide document that the Chase credit card account #233232 is reporting accurately, and that my federal rights have not been violated.”
Making claims like “not my account,” when in fact it is their account, is risky business. If you make such a claim and they find out the accounts are truly your clients, then what?The line is drawn and further disputes can be thorny.
As we mentioned in principle #3, credit repair involves three truthful Tactics:
a) Polite and courteous requests,
b) Requests for information, andc) Deliberate and aggressive demands.
