When someone else's life is on your report

I have an aunt — by marriage, in the loose way my family assigns aunts — who shares a name, a birth month and a former zip code with a woman she has never met. For eleven years the other woman's auto loan appeared on my aunt's TransUnion file, was disputed, was removed, and reappeared the next time the lender reported, because the lender's file matched on enough points that the bureau's software kept stitching them back together.

That's a mixed file. The March article on LexisNexis touched it; this one is about what to do.

How it happens

Bureaus match incoming data to existing files on partial information — name, some digits of a Social Security number, a birth date, an address. The matching is tuned to catch you when you move or change your name; the cost of that is catching someone who resembles you. Similar names in the same region, family members with shared addresses, and a one-digit transposition in a Social are the usual routes in.

The words that matter

The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires every consumer reporting agency to follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy. That phrase — Section 1681e(b). Is the backbone of nearly every mixed-file case that's ever been won, because a bureau that keeps re-merging two people after being told they're two people is, on its face, not following a reasonable procedure.

Use it. A mixed-file dispute isn't "this account isn't mine." It's: this account belongs to a different consumer; here is my identification; the file is mixed; I am requesting that you separate the files and correct your procedures so the item does not reappear. Ask for the results in writing and ask what the bureau did to prevent recurrence.

What to send

Identification, always: license, a utility bill, the Social Security card if you're comfortable, so the match is forced onto the full number rather than a fragment. Anything showing the other person's details. A different middle name on the collector's letter, a different address on the account, helps the bureau see two people.

Dispute at every bureau where the stranger appears, and at LexisNexis and Innovis, which is often where the merge started. If an item comes back a second time after a successful dispute, that's the moment for a CFPB complaint, and, honestly, the moment to talk to a consumer attorney, because repeat re-merging is the fact pattern the statute was written for.

Next: the difference between "paid" and "gone," and what to ask a collector for before you send money.