What I'm about to tell you is the story and it's a true story. I received a call from a mortgage lender who had pulled a credit report for a mortgage. The individual, john Fraser was a married man with two children, both young and age. He had come from another country to the United States quite a few years ago, and now wanted to provide a home for his children and his wife had gone on Credit Karma and looked at his report and scores. The scores were in the mid seven hundreds. Now the scores I am referring to were from Equifax and TransUnion.
And again, there were not fica scores. JOHN called Chris will mortgage officer to get pre approved for a mortgage. And As stated earlier, a mortgage application was completed and the credit report polled. As you might know, a mortgage requires a three year old report where Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are all reporting on one credit report. It is known as a tri merge. What Chris noticed was that the experience score was significantly lower than the other two by over 150 points.
That is substantial. JOHN never found out about it until going for a mortgage as Credit Karma does not pull from Experian. Here's the point. Never trust the information regarding credit reports from third party sources. Just because you can view two reports such as Equifax and TransUnion does not mean that Experian will be the same sometimes there can be a significant difference and Credit Karma does not use FICO scoring uses a system that very few if any creditors use to determine creditworthiness. Now to go further with the story, what was on John's Experian report was that was severely diminished his credit score were 11 Medical deaths that were in collections.
I spoke with john about those medical deaths and he determined that they were not his. He nor any member of his family had gone to the doctor for a long time. So he challenged the items. The initial challenges went to the credit bureaus and they came back as verified. We then went directly to the creditors, the hospital, and the debt collectors to validate the debts, the proof of debt. The validation that came back from the creditors in the hospital was that of a totally different person.
I referred him to an FDCPA attorney, and they immediately sent or sued the credit bureaus to creditors, and the doctors have validated the debt when he initially applied For the home loan, the interest rate was three quarters of a point lower than what it was at the current time. The reporting of erroneous and bad data would cost my client thousands of dollars in x in excess interest he would have to pay. The first thing that credit bureaus did was immediately remove all the medical debt collections from his credit report. That's called mitigating your losses. At that point, john could go forward and purchase his home. As the change in interest rate was detrimental to my client, john friends is victorious lawsuit gained almost $100,000.
My last point if information on your credit report does not appear correct, or do you feel there might be erroneous information or outdated information, even to include balances? You have the right to challenge that item. Do it and don't give up