awww,, this is the time of giving and stealing, just last week my gf got a call from niki shoes, it sounded like a scam, I told her to hang up and check her bank account,,, sure enough there was a charge, so we called back and some1 had bought some shoes $194 on her debit card/check card, how they get all the info they need is beyond me, when she called the bank they said they had already tried bestbuy for 3k, I have her on my account so I went online and did fraud alerts on both of us....
Stop the madness b4 it gets u
There's a good chance that it's not fraud at all, but just sloppiness on the part of the bureaus and/or the lenders.
You'd be appalled at how little they bother to match --a last name, maybe a first initial, street name (and it could be a street you used to live at and the account holder currently lives at, like "Oak Street."), year of birth, on and on. No, they don't bother to match socials exactly.
As long as your mortgage lender isn't giving you a hard time about it, you might want to hold off trying to clean it up, again, as long as the mortgage lender doesn't get twitchy. I agree with the credit freezes, too.
btw, ANYONE applying for a mortgage should freeze their accounts anyway before starting the mortgage process. Way too many sketchy things go on, including the credit bureaus selling the names of mortgage applicants to junk debt buyers, who will hope to slap a collection on you, knowing that you'll pay anything to keep the mortgage closing on track. Yes, the credit bureaus do this, yes, the junk debt buyers do this, and no, there are no effective legal protections for consumers, other than the aforesaid freezing of reports.
@quest208 wrote:how does a tradeline get into someone's file? wouldn't the CRA be able to determine how it got there? like...yesterday it wasnt there. today its there. someone did something today to put it there. cant that be determine?...?
OP, im rootin for you your home. hope everything falls into place, just the way you like it LOL
happy holidays!
I don't know if there's an audit trail. (That would imply that they care about accountability. 
)
My understanding is that when account info is transmitted, it is matched to an existing file, and the matching isn't terribly rigorous. Don't know the details, though.
Although this isn't the case in the OP's situation, we've had lots of threads by people getting siblings' and parents' info on their files, strangers with same first initial + same last name + same year of birth, that sort of thing.
There's a ton of data flooding into the bureaus, and if they didn't bother to set it up properly, I can easily imagine lots of mistakes. I work in medical records, and you wouldn't believe the amount of checking and cross-checking that goes on (bar-coding on printed documents to be scanned, for instance), and even then, mistakes happen.
@lesaheart wrote:
...I now wonder about these credit bureaus. These accounts were opened using only my social security number. The criminals used a different birth date, phone number, and address and the results of the investigations state that after their review they found that I do indeed own these account. How does their investigation work? They have my address on file, my date of birth, my social security number, phone number, and many things even my family would not know---did they based their decision only on my social security number? If so, then I'm....
That was their investigation. They looked at the SSN and said, Yup, it's yours.
Congrats on starting to get all this untangled. It sure won't happen without a lot of rolled-up sleeves on your part.