When the accounts on your report were never yours

Identity theft: the first seventy two hours

Speed matters, because the earlier the fraud is documented the harder it becomes for a creditor to argue that you acquiesced in the account. Place a fraud alert with one bureau, which is required to notify the other two. Consider a security freeze, which is free and blocks new credit from being opened until you lift it. File a report with the Federal Trade Commission through IdentityTheft.gov, which produces the identity theft report the statute references, and file a police report where local practice permits. Then notify each creditor in writing rather than by phone, so that there is a record of the date you gave notice.

The blocking request

Once you provide an identity theft report, proof of identity, and identification of the fraudulent items, the bureaus must block that information from your file, generally within four business days, and must notify the furnisher. This is a stronger remedy than an ordinary dispute because it does not wait on the furnisher's investigation. It is also more procedurally demanding, and blocking requests are frequently rejected on technical grounds when the documentation is incomplete. Preparing them correctly the first time is a large part of what we do in these cases.

Making the creditor produce its file

A victim of identity theft is entitled to obtain from the creditor the application and business transaction records related to the fraudulent account. In practice this request resolves a substantial number of cases outright. Where a creditor cannot produce a signed application, cannot identify the delivery address for the card, and cannot explain how the identity was verified, it is in a poor position to insist the account belongs to you. Where the records do exist, they usually identify the address, device, or account the fraud was routed through, which is useful evidence on its own.

Mixed files, the harder problem

A mixed file occurs when the bureau's matching logic attaches another person's tradelines to your report. It happens most often between family members with similar names, between people with transposed digits in a social security number, and between consumers with a common name who once shared an address. There is no fraud to report and no identity theft affidavit to file, so the blocking remedy does not apply.

The difficulty is that a routine dispute treats each foreign tradeline as an isolated error. The bureau may delete the item, but the underlying association between the two records remains, and new data belonging to the other consumer continues to flow in. Files that keep re-acquiring the same stranger's accounts after repeated deletions are almost always mixed files, and the correction has to address the identifiers and the matching logic rather than the individual entries. That argument requires evidence that the file contains identifiers belonging to someone else, and it usually requires escalation beyond the standard dispute channel.

Why these cases justify representation

Identity theft and mixed file cases involve a longer documentation trail, more parties, and more opportunities for a technical rejection than an ordinary inaccuracy. They also tend to produce the clearest violations, because once a bureau has been given an identity theft report or clear proof of a mixed identity and continues to report the information anyway, its conduct is difficult to characterize as reasonable. Those are the files where the enforcement provisions of the statute do the most work.