Re: credit bureaus' scam #4 & #5

Negative items must remain on reports for seven years (or ten years for bankruptcy tradelines).

That's sheer and utter balderdash. Even so, consumers hear it every day when they telephone creditors directly: "Sorry, by law that has to remain on your report for seven years." The next time you hear that, know this: The automaton posing as a customer service representative is either spreading lies or ignorance, neither of which is good for your fiscal or mental health.

Sure, the bureaus want consumers to believe the lie because they have based their business plans upon reporting nasties to their subscribers, and they don't want to run out of them. The truth, though, is that nobody is required to report anything about any of us for any minimum length of time to anybody else. Put bluntly, relevant laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act only serve to place LIMITS upon how consumer reporting agencies can and cannot behave.

By definition, helping someone else to straighten out their erroneous credit reports violates the law.

Such statements are the most insidious and sickest lies of all. In fact, this is the very same psychology a predator uses with his victim: "Here, I'm abusing you, but follow my rules. You can't talk to others about it. You can't ask for help. If you do request or receive help from someone else, you'll only suffer more damage in the long run. Keep to yourself. Remember that I'll tell lies about you if I wish. And if you have any problem with any of this, speak only to me about it."

The facts cut straight to our constitutional citizenship: All of us have a fundamental right to legal representation. Whenever we are accused of anything, whether that accusation appears in the newspaper, on a rap sheet, on a credit report, or anywhere else, we are guaranteed the right to request assistance with both understanding and defending against such allegations.

Credit bureaus occasionally (and vaguely) suggest that using a third-party violates some law. Sometimes, they'll send a letter to consumers who have challenged one or more items on their reports that basically accuses them of having sought outside assistance with the problem. Note that they never actually come out and say plainly, "Using outside counsel is against the law," because it isn't. Instead they simply invite the consumer to write back and deny the charge or to implicate the third-party somehow in some unnamed wrongdoing. The specific wrongdoing is never spelled out, of course, but the effect is the same: The credit bureaus, by donning the cloak of artificial officialdom, hope to intimidate consumers into backing down and getting right back into line with all the other quiet people who are afraid to challenge their faux authority. Lexington clients are instructed to simply send such letters to the firm, but even those attempting to confront their credit reports on their own are well advised to simply ignore such provocations.

So long as consumers can be managed through skilled deception, credit bureaus will continue to unfairly profit at our expense. Reified credit scores will continue to define our suitability for home ownership. Credit acquisition, insurance, and employment will continue to be lost as a result of sloppy data maintenance. Fundamental changes will only occur when consumers reject these untruths which are propagated so successfully within our culture.