The buyer who mailed Experian's headquarters

A dispute mailed to a bureau's corporate office may never be logged as a dispute. The thirty-day clock you're pricing the lock against may not have started.

The video tells buyers the P.O. Box is a scanning farm and the executives are at headquarters, so send it there. The buyer does, certified, and shows you the green card as proof. The card proves a mailroom signed for an envelope. It does not prove a reinvestigation exists.

Danny fixes air conditioners. He says the thermostat isn't broken because you yelled at the wrong wall.

Here is the calendar. Day one the letter arrives at an executive office and a clerk routes it. Day five it reaches the dispute center, or it reaches a correspondence file. Day thirty passes with no results letter. Day forty-one the buyer calls you. Day forty-five is when the results and the notice were due, and if the letter went to the file instead of the queue, nothing is coming. Your lock has thirty days left and the item is still there.

One question, before you price anything: "Which address did you mail it to?" If the answer is anything other than the dispute address printed on the report, assume no dispute is pending.

Then three steps.

Have the buyer re-send today, certified, to the dispute address on the last page of the current report, with the same exhibits. The clock starts on receipt of that one.

Do not lock on the assumption the first letter counts. If the results arrive from the first letter after all, that is a gift, not a plan.

Send the buyer to Calvin's piece, which explains the two addresses without your name on it. They'll hear "you sent it to the wrong place" from you and "here's why it matters" from him.

If the item is real and the buyer has the document, the second letter works the same as the first would have, thirty days later than it needed to. The corporate address is for the step after that, if the bureau verifies without looking, and the file is what you take there.

Eight files. Most services check three, and mail them to the wrong place. Send the buyer before they find the next video: the referral takes twelve minutes.