‘Credit Washing’: How Some Credit-Repair Firms Inflate Credit Scores
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Here's your Money Briefing for Tuesday, December 13th. I'm Danny Lewis for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for J.R. Whelan. If you've ever been the victim of identity theft, you know how hard it can be to file a claim and to try and fix any damage that's been done to your credit score. In recent years, the U.S. government has tried to make that easier, but there's a catch.
The purpose of creating this site was to make it easier for people to get an identity theft report in order to be able to file a claim with a credit reporting firm. However, it also has made it easy for fraudsters.
Our reporter, Anna Maria Andriotis, has been looking into a practice known as credit washing. On today's show, she'll break down how it works and what it means for you and your credit. That's after the break.
This podcast is brought to you by ReliaQuest. Cyber criminals are constantly attacking. They want your data. They want your identity. They want your innovation. ReliaQuest fortifies your business with agentic defense, AI that detects, contains, and eliminates cyber threats in minutes. It helps your security team move faster at the work that matters most to protect the business now and delivers insights to help them predict what's next. ReliaQuest, agentic defense for the enterprise. Learn more at ReliaQuest.com.
What is “credit washing” and why is identitytheft.gov implicated?
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The consumer credit scoring system can be confusing, especially when your score has been dinged by identity theft. A few years ago, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission set up a website, identitytheft.gov, to make it easier for people to remove fraudulent accounts and charges from their credit reports. But the credit reporting industry says that's led to some companies filing false identity theft claims to temporarily boost a customer's credit score, a practice they call credit washing. So if you're having trouble with your credit, what do you need to know? The Wall Street Journal's Ana Maria Andriotis has been looking into credit washing, and she joins us now. Hey, Ana Maria, thanks for being here.
Great to be speaking with you.
So walk me through how this happens. How might a typical consumer get wrapped up in one of these credit washing schemes?
So there's tons of things that people would want to get off their credit report. Bankruptcies, if they had a missed payment to their credit card or to some other type of loan, credit cards that are maxed out, things that might make people look like they're too in debt. There's an industry essentially that makes its money by telling people that it can remove negative items from their credit report. And these companies are called credit repair firms. they're all over social media and they really do attract people's attention. So when, you know, people present themselves as, you know, I'm with a credit repair company and I can help you increase your overall credit standing and you can get that car you want, or you can become a homeowner that becomes really appealing to people.
What people don't often know is some of the tactics that some of these companies use in order to increase their credit scores and get negative items removed from their credit reports because federal law that governs the credit reporting industry states that as long as a consumer files all the required documents with the credit reporting firms when they're making the allegation of identity theft. The account needs to get removed from the credit report within four business days. Now, if the investigation finds that actually this was a legitimate account, the credit reporting firms can add that back on to the credit reports.
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