On 1/29/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/29/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Can someone really "run up a big bill and leave you with it"? I thought your authorization was needed in order to enter into a loan.
But they got 'your' authorization.
They got the authorization of someone pretending to be you. If that's what you mean by "your", then yeah. Granted, it might be hard to get it off your credit report, as that might ultimately require *initiating* a lawsuit, but Fred seemed to imply that the "victim" (that is, the person whose identity was being used) was actually responsible for the loan just because someone used their personal information without their authorization!
IOW, I thought that while the credit reporting agencies might report the outstanding loan, no court would actually attempt to enforce such a loan.
Straightening out your credit rating can occassionally be difficult, but the vast majority of the time it's actually quite straightforward. Actually getting a bank to "forgive" a debt on the other hand...
The challenge can be convincing them it wasn't you... once you've done that it's just a matter of getting people to apply some common sense.
In the few cases I've personally witnessed where there were false items on someone's credit report, the creditors have been fairly easy to convince to remove the information from the report. One thing that does help is contacting the creditor first, because the credit reporting agency is pretty much always going to believe them (and the law largely backs them up in this position). "Identity theft" can definitely be a nightmare in the case of a stubborn creditor or a really well executed attack, but I've always assumed the person who actually loses the money is the creditor, barring some sort of negligence on the part of the "victim".
Anthony