What happens with credit reporting after you win your collection trial?
What happens with credit reporting after you win your collection trial?
When you are in court and you win, what happens with your credit reporting after the trial?
You want the debt removed from your report, but how does this happen?
Do you ask the judge?
Does this happen automatically?
In this post, we’ll discuss how to wrap things up after you win.
You go to court and you win your case. What happens now?
The judge does not control your credit report.
The judge will not say “Now that the defendant has won, I will tell Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to fix the credit report.”
This is not the judge’s responsibility.
All the judge does is issue the order saying that you won.
In Alabama, you have two possibilities for fixing your credit reporting.
You could wait to see what the debt buyer or original creditor does with your credit report.
30 days after you beat them in trial, they update your report. What does it say?
Did they delete the debt?
Is there a balance?
What do they report 60 days after? 90 days after? 120 days after?
At some point during this process, you may stop and say, “They lost. They know they lost. They hired a lawyer. I even have a copy of the court order to prove it.”
They never should have updated the account on your report.
They should have immediately deleted it.
If they updated in 30 days, maybe we just sue them.
If it’s a debt collector, we sue them under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA).
Specifically, we sue them under FDCPA section 1692 e(8).
Basically, 1692 e(8) says that a debt collector cannot credit report information that they know is false or that they should know is false.
For example, if you dispute a debt, the debt collector must mark it as disputed on your credit report.
If a judge has said that you do not owe this debt, then this should certainly not be on your credit report.
Sometimes we just sue them for this.
Many times, we will dispute the debt first.
What you say in your dispute will differ depending on your situation.
One possibility is that you write a very detailed letter to the credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion).
In your letter, you say, “Midland Funding sued me. Here is a copy of the lawsuit concerning this particular account. I defended that case and I won. Here is a copy of the judge’s order saying that I do not owe this debt. Remove this debt from my credit report.”
If the credit bureaus say they will not remove this from the report, we would sue both the credit bureaus and the debt buyer.
We sue both the bureaus and the furnisher (debt collector) because they have all violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) if you have shown that you were sued and won.
In most states, if you win a case that means you were not guilty of whatever you had been accused of.
They accused you of owing $5,000 to the debt buyer.
You went to court and won. You do not owe this money.
It should be removed from your credit report.
You could also send in a general dispute.
This dispute would just say, “I don’t owe this debt buyer any money. Go check with them. They’ll tell you I don’t owe any money. I want this off my report.”
This type of dispute is not really enough, in my opinion, to sue the credit bureaus.
You haven’t provided enough proof directly to the bureaus.
If this is the case, it is certainly enough to sue the debt buyer. Just not the credit bureaus.
These are the possibilities available to you in Alabama.
The first is that you can just wait to see if the debt collector removes the account on their own.
If they do not remove the account, then you sue them under the FDCPA.
This may not apply to original creditors such as Citi Bank or Capital One depending on your state’s laws. Be sure to check for your specific state.
The second possibility is that you send in a dispute and use the FCRA.
You send in a very detailed dispute and include the court order. If the error is not fixed, you sue both the credit bureaus and the furnisher.
If you decide to send in a general dispute without the court order, you would only sue the furnisher, not the credit bureaus.
We hope this is helpful to you!
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