So my story comes as I am 28 and recently new to the “credit frontier”.
In the last year I have been promoted and making very good money. I also moved to another state for this promotion.
I started to “acquire” credit this year starting with my Truck in Feb of this year. My two credit cards Capital one and First Premier’s as of June. This month Capital one “uped” me to $500 I guess as a courtesy.
I had (two months) ago applied for a loan for my wedding and I was denied. Well I haven’t been denied before so I didn’t understand this. The only time I had applied for credit – I got it.
My bank told me my “score wasn’t high enough”, “new to credit” and I had a “few derogatory.” I didn’t know what that meant so I went to my credit to find out exactly what this meant.
Well since researching this and MANY other things Ive learned A LOT about credit that I never understood.
My story goes far but I wanted to start with
The “few derogatory” accounts I have are with a company called Pay Alliance. These were from 2006. I called and requested information from them and they sent me these “Return checks”. To make a long story short I had closed that account and at the time didn’t realize I had them. I lived in a very small town and three were for under $11 to the small “convenient” store right up the road. When I closed the account Jody at the bank had called me (my memory is a little fuzzy) and told me about these 3 checks and 2 others with dicks (those were like $40 dollars)
I then contacted the sister of the store owner as he has just sold the store to her. I went up (high school friend) and embarrassed I paid them. She didn’t even charge me the NSF or return fee.
I also contacted the small grocery store (an elderly gentleman owned it at the time) and went and paid him (he did charge me but I cant recall if it was for the full amount of a charge or just like $10 each for the two)
Well after receiving these checks I contacted the small store and talked to my high school friend who still owned it (took a week of calling and leaving message and playing phone tag with her) but she remembered very vaguely that I had in fact taken care of these. I gave her their number to the credit agency and they informed her she wasn’t the owner at the time and the store Travis’s was no longer called that (she renamed it). I then called back and spoke with a gentleman explaining yet again this story and he provided me with the “merchant” number for her to call and another number. I am going to give this to her. So this is TBD!
Now my real predicament is I didn’t know Dick’s sold since then as it was still Dicks. A Korean Lady owns it now (her name still I don’t know and after asking two times for her to repeat it I feel as if I was starting to offend her) her “not the greatest” English I couldn’t understand a lot of what she said and Im sure she didn’t understand what I was asking as this was before she owned the store. She kept saing “She has no records.” I don’t know if she thought I was attempting to collect from her or what. She said she would call me back finally thinking she may be able to provide me with something showing that I paid this. She didn’t call after a week (of course now I have an out of town number Im sure that didn’t help). I called back again and again explaining to her I paid these bad checks she said “It not her and I have no records from old owner”.
I called and explained this to the people at Payalliance and all they could ask was “do you have record”. Well Im sure I paid the guy cash and even got the checks back (it was seriously three weeks max I recall after my account closed). No I do not have those checks anymore and no I do not have record, but neither do they!
What am I supposed to do? This was in 2006 and they only have that I “owe” some debt and not that I paid this; and they have no previous owner who originally filed this to confirm or deny this information. On these two checks. I also went the route of giving in and saying if I paid these would they just take them from my credit entirely but they said no they would just update them as Paid.
Im kind of at a loss with the Dicks (and don’t know about the other three but I hope with her calling this will be fixed)
Don’t these people “buy” debit from companies and collect it on their own – other than verifying the check don’t they have to prove the validity of my claim – which they can’t because I can’t even contact the original owner!
Also I have disputed with the credit bureaus these report to and they came back saying "this is me" I thought they had to prove more than that based on the reason of my dipsute
Any advice would be appreciated
Thank you for all who do respond
