Judgemens and scumbag collection agencies

From: christina357

My husband and I have been plagued with bad debt for years. We had lived in an apartment complex for 9 years. Over the years, we have had judgements placed on us for nonpayment of rent. We always were able to get caught up before we had to go to court and in one instance they wouldn't accept our payment and made us go to court--the judge dismissed that one, but it is still on my report. Either way they were all paid the same month of the judgement. When we pulled our credit to get our mortgage, we saw that all of these judgements were marked unpaid and had been that way for years.

I went to the apartment complex and asked them why they were listed this way. This is exactly what they told me. We only release the judgments if the people request them. He had to get a hold of the attorney to get them! Now, is it not their responsibility to report accurately? Who is at fault here? Is it the apartment complex or the Court for not showing the release? Or is it the credit reporting agency for not making sure the data they furnish is accurate? I assume that the apartment complex is at fault somehow and to know that they do this as standard practice is mindblowing!

Anyway, no matter who was at fault, I didn't have time to go through the traditional process to get our credit repaired so we used Credit Technologies which is a credit repair company that fixes your credit in 72 hours. I provided them with all of my releases and they updated the report. Except instead of putting the actual date it was released, she put the date that she got the correction. The judgments all read "Date Paid: 1/2004 or 3/2004. I was trying to make my scores go up and they did--slightly. But according to the way FICO scoring works, didn't she do damage as well by making an old debt look current. Doesn't that mean with the date paid being in 2004, that would represent the last activity on the account and it will be on my report for another 10 years? Instead of it looking like we took care of our debts immediately, it now looked like we wanted a house and waited until the last minute to fix our credit. Do judgments stay on the report for 10 years and other items for 7.5 years? It cost me $375.00 for them to make errors on my credit report in a timely 72 hour manner. My scores didn't go to where I needed them to go either.

Then I had a collection that was reporting as open and she recommended that I pay it because it was reporting every month. Isn't it illegal to list a collection as an open account anyway and to report every new month as the date last delinquent if I did not enter into a payment arrangement with them? (see Credit Reports: Original Debt is more than 6 years old...Collection Agency lists as new debt). Shouldn't she have known that and corrected the error by changing it to a collection account and putting the correct date for last delinquent? Instead, I paid a $6,655.00 collection for a settlement of $4300.00 and it had no effect on my scores at all and the comments they listed were very deragatory. Had I known then what I know now, I would have addressed the actual error instead of borrowing from my mom to pay the debt.

While I won't be answering this lady on another forum, it does show how much misery and problems are caused by those who won't do their jobs right.