How to Avoid Credit Repair and Credit Building Scams

Credit Repair companies often fall prey to fraudsters who take advantage of people’s eagerness to improve their credit quickly.

Credit rebuilding involves changing your spending behaviors to build up a positive credit history over time. While this process takes more time and patience than traditional repairs, its effects will last far longer.

A reliable credit repair company adheres to applicable consumer laws and best practices to provide effective services.

Getting Started

Credit repair businesses often receive negative press. According to the FTC, scammers may pose as credit repair businesses and disappear with consumers’ funds.

Start your credit repair business on an honest note by formulating an honest plan with financial projections and an realistic business model, unique selling propositions (USPs) to distinguish yourself from competition, and creating unique selling points (USPs) which help stimulate buyer desire while building trust among your customer base.

Understand the significance of providing clients with a pleasant client experience and its effect on your bottom line. Successful credit repair businesses know this well: their clients rave about them to friends and colleagues! Building relationships takes time, patience, and perseverance but is essential to long-term success; having an established clientele helps you attract new business while increasing revenue opportunities.

Disputes

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you have the right to dispute any information on your credit report that you believe to be inaccurate. Credit bureaus must conduct an investigation, forward copies of supporting documentation to any information furnishers involved and then notify you of their findings; if inaccurate data is discovered it must either be corrected or deleted immediately.

A good credit repair company should be able to identify errors in your reports, then send all necessary documents directly to credit bureaus on your behalf. They should also help negotiate with creditors or debt collectors to remove negative items from your reports.

Experian’s Dispute Center makes filing disputes easy; only use reliable, trustworthy sources when creating disputes on your own. Some companies provide software and applications that automate this process and make filing disputes on your behalf simpler – offering less labor intensive approaches to credit repair.

Monitoring Your Credit Reports

Some credit repair companies attempt to lure consumers with promises of improving their scores by challenging information on their reports, but the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warns against those that charge upfront fees, guarantee positive results or encourage consumers to lie.

A legitimate credit repair service will thoroughly examine your report for discrepancies such as incorrect bankruptcy listings or overdue payments that were paid on time, before sending letters to credit bureaus requesting removal of these negative items from your report.

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, credit bureaus are obligated to respond within 30 days or remove an inaccurate item; however, this process can take several months due to communication back and forth between credit bureaus and themselves. Some credit repair companies advise opening new accounts to add positive information into your report; this may be beneficial depending on your past behavior and history.

Building Credit

Build credit by paying down debt, using credit responsibly and opening new accounts. But it may take some time before positive results appear on your score – particularly if creditors and bureaus take their sweet time in reporting relevant information to credit bureaus.

Make sure to request and review reports from all three credit bureaus in order to protect yourself against errors that could affect all three scores – it is worth making the effort and reviewing each of them carefully!

Avoid applying for new lines of credit while in the midst of rebuilding your credit. Each inquiry leaves an indelible mark on your report and can cause your score to take a hit. Try to limit hard inquiries to once or twice annually for best results.