If someone steals your identity and uses it to commit fraud or other crimes that can affect your credit, there's a section of the law designed to help you deal with those issues. It’s part of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), and it’s formally known as 15 U.S.C. § 1681c-2. This section gives you the right to block any information that shows up on your credit report as a result of identity theft.
Here's how it works: If you've been a victim of identity theft, you can reach out to the credit reporting agencies—like Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—and ask them to block the fraudulent information from your credit report. This means that dodgy debts or credit inquiries made by the identity thief won’t keep hurting your credit score.
To have information blocked, you generally need to:- Provide proof of your identity, so the agency knows they're dealing with the real you.
- Give a copy of an identity theft report, which could be a police report or a report to a government agency, showing that you've been the victim of identity theft.
- Specify which information on your report is a result of fraud. You might need to indicate specific accounts or transactions that were not authorized by you.
Once you’ve done that, the credit reporting agency is required to promptly block the fraudulent information from your credit report, usually within four business days. This should stop the bad information from bringing down your credit score and affecting your chances of getting loans or other forms of credit in the future.
Let’s say someone opened a credit card in your name without you knowing and ran up a huge bill. Once you realize you've been a victim of identity theft, you'd report it and request the fraudulent credit card account be blocked from your credit report. As long as you provide all the necessary documentation, that debt wouldn’t show up on your credit report going forward.
Keep in mind that this section of the law doesn't solve all problems related to the fraud; you might still need to work with creditors and other entities to clear your name fully. But it does give you a clear route to getting your credit report cleaned up as far as the false information is concerned.
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