Credit Reporting & Repair
View all credit reporting and repair companies.
View all articles on identity theft protection.
Up until a few years ago, the term credit reporting referred to your actual report, issued from one of three major credit reporting agencies, Equifax®, TransUnion®, or Experian®. In recent years, a number of credit reporting and repair companies have come forth offering services that includes identity theft protection, unusual activity notification, and credit repair.
What is Credit Monitoring & Repair?
Credit monitoring is often referred to as identity theft protection and is designed to help a person should their personal information, i.e. social security number, banking information, or some other form of sensitive information, fall into the wrong hands. Most identity theft protection companies will notify their customers if suspicious activity occurs, including the selling of your personal information via the internet. In addition, credit repair, often called credit resolution, is the process of working with credit bureaus and associated parties to repairing, or resolving, fraudulent activity.
Credit monitoring is a service that is often included when one signs up for identity theft protection. However, monitoring your own credit is something that you can do yourself without having to pay the fees associated with a provider. To monitor your credit yourself, simply obtain your consumer credit reports from the three major credit reporting agencies listed above, and regularly check for any irregular activity, such as new accounts or unused accounts you’re not familiar with. If you find suspicious activity on your consumer credit report(s), immediately contact the agency and notify them of necessary amendments.
Notification, including email alerts and/or a phone call, should suspicious activity occur, is the main reason for utilizing identity theft protection services. Although many banks, credit card companies, and other financial organizations provide their customers with notification of suspicious activity, most companies do not raise a red-flag to newly opened accounts.
For most people, there is definitely value in paying a company to watch and help repair your credit. Especially, when considering that identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in the world, with nearly one in every twenty adults having been victimized. Plus, if you have, or do, become the victim of identity theft, you can rest assured knowing that most companies guarantee their services. Most companies will also help you with repairing your credit by dealing directly with Equifax®, TransUnion®, and Experian® to have damaging accounts removed. To learn more, please visit each of the credit reporting and repair company profiles listed above.
Credit Reporting & Repair Information that May Affect You
FICO® 850 – The Perfect Credit Score is a Reality – “The perfect FICO score is not just a theoretical possibility, but indeed a genuine reality for an extraordinarily small number of prospective subscribers to communications service providers around the nation,” said David Howe, president of SubscriberWise. “We’ve examined data of more than 180,000 credit submissions exclusively from communications operators and have found an infinitesimal 0.09% – approximately one tenth of one percent of the total scorable population – has achieved a perfect FICO 850. In other words, to put this into perspective, if one considered the estimated 170 million U.S. scorable adult credit consuming population, only 153,000 perfect FICO scores would exist nationwide based on SubscriberWise statistics alone.”
McAfee, Inc. Launches The First Comprehensive Personal Identity Protection Product From A Leading Security Company – Javelin Research reports that individuals who took six or more months to detect fraud suffered more than 14 times the cost of those victims who discovered fraud in its early stages.1 McAfee Identity Protection alerts users of potential threats to their identities, ultimately saving them both time and money.
“There have been more victims of identity theft in the last year than any other time in the past six years2 and consumers repeatedly rank identity theft as a top concern because of the substantial remediation costs,” said Todd Gebhart, executive vice president of McAfee consumer, mobile and small business. “To address this market need, McAfee has created a product that is truly customer-focused and proactive. We put victims first, offering a best-in-class fraud resolution service that provides unlimited support, and the strongest collection of identity monitoring and alerting capabilities in the industry. In combination with a McAfee PC security suite, McAfee Identity Protection offers complete personal and online identity protection.”
Credit-Repair Service Sued by Attorney General – Attorney General Martha Coakley’s lawsuit against Silvia and Souza alleges that the two women unlawfully charged fees prior to performing the credit repair service they promised and also violated state and federal law by failing to include required information on written materials and consumer contracts.
The women, operating under the business names Credit Score Rebuilders and Integrity Credit Restoration, attempted to remove every negative item on a consumer’s credit report, even if the item was accurate, Coakley’s office said yesterday.
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