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I just turned 18, and I checked my 3 credit reports and experian has my birthdate wrong. I was born in 94, but it says I was born in 1993. I check the inquries, and 12 hard inquries showed up, I never applied for credit, so I don't know how thats possible. When I clicked on public records, its showing my brother judgement from last year, and his name is showing up under equifax instead of mines. How can I fix my date of birth, remove my brother's judgement, and clear all the hard inquries?
Your brother didn't seek credit with your SS# did he? You need to ask him. This has the hallmarks of fraud perpetrated by a family member.
No, he never had access to it.
Place fraud alerts on all your credit reports. Call Equifax, Experian, and Transunion and request it. It is free. You need to get to the bottom of that judgment. You need to dispute that with Equifax as not yours and find out why they have your brother's name on your credit report.
Are there hard inquiries on all 3 reports or just Equifax?
4 Experian, 4 Equifax, and 4 TransUnion. I'll dispute the report right away!
Dispute the inquiries as well. It's not a simple mistake. Someone was seeking credit with your SS#. Are the dates on the inquiries before you turned 18? That should be enough to get them removed.
Also, whoever is requesting credit in your name claimed your birthday as 93 so that it was possible to extend you credit as it aged you to 18.
I will add that this might well be fraud, but it also might well be a classic example of the sloppiness with which the credit bureaus handle our info.
OP (original poster), if you have a common last name, and you live in a large city (just an example), someone else's info might be on your reports by accident. The bureaus don't knock themselves out in matching up your SSN, DOB, etc.
But you definitely do need to follow up on it, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to place fraud alerts on all three.
You also might consider subscribing to a credit monitoring service, one that follows all three reports. Ignore the scores and advice that come with them --every single 3-in-1 credit monitoring service provides FAKO's without exception, sorry folks, but that's true --but they're great for paying attention to your credit reports, which is what really matters.
Check out llec's Credit Monitoring Service (CMS) Guide, paying particular attention to the most recent pages. (Stuff changes a lot.)
Good luck!
It is going to be a pain to fix but you need to do it before doing anything. Call up their identity fheft departments and ask for entire file to be wiped.
As for credit montioring, it isn't a bad idea, but being 18, I imagine it might be expensive for you. Try creditkarma.com and creditseasame.com. They have a pseudo montioring service. creditkarma uses TU and you can go in daily for it to pull new report and report changes in score which therefore tells you something changed on credit report. creditseasame uses experian if I remember correctly and auto pulls once a month.