topic Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware) in General Credit Topics

The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 10:34:08 GMT

I recently had 9 collections come up that I didn’t even know existed. None of these were on any of my credit reports, not yet at least. Some were a few years old, were all medical and truly had the right to be on my credit. I had not seen a bill for any of these or if I had, it had been years. So why out of the blue?
I just got a refinance and had a major increase in score right before. So here is what happened. All the reporting agencies have something called a “Trigger Report”. These are usually a monthly subscription with which they will let your creditors know about any changes to your profile. They can pay for things like change of address, increase or decrease in score, new credit, paying a collection and many more items.
My increase in score and refinance made this “trigger” that gave the appearance that I’m better off financially. It’s all legal, I was concerned about privacy laws but if you have a relationship with a creditor, they have legal right to the information.
I don’t agree with this practice and feel it’s an underhanded tactic by the CRA and creditor but can’t stop it.
In my case, this cost me a good chunk because now that the dragon had been woke, this was my warning that these collections were going to now appear on my reports. Luckily I was able to settle with all of them and they are paid in full and will not appear.
Just wanted everyone to know about this shady tactic

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 10:44:48 GMT

Wow! This is terrible! I wonder why the creditors wouldn't just put it on your CR beforehand? Perhaps they think you're more likely to pay because of your score increase?

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 11:17:06 GMT

The way this is setup they don’t have to pull your credit, the CRA gives them a constant “heads up” about us.
If I had not been able to settle these and they hit my credit before closing on my refinance, the deal wouldn’t have gone through. While we were in application and before closing, the lender told me to be sure nothing happened on my credit, especially no new credit. These would have been new collections.
So these collections agencies were just sitting on these, not pursuing or reporting but just waiting. They got the trigger and pounced.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

OmarR — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:01:20 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
I recently had 9 collections come up that I didn’t even know existed. Luckily I was able to settle with all of them and they are paid in full and will not appear.

So you got 9 PFD's?

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Jnbmom — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:10:31 GMT

I am curious who told you about these "trigger reports"?

Not sure why they wouuld have to pay for anything. If you have a creditor or debt collector they can and usually do soft pulls on your reports and can see any activity on your profile.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 17:20:31 GMT

Yeah it doesn’t surprise me in the least that credit alerts aren’t just for consumers. Since they are already sending alerts to us, it makes perfect sense that the CAs can get alerts as well.

Glad to hear that you were able to get it taken care of. I disagree that you can’t contest this activity though. Medical collections are the most likely to be debts that you are totally unaware of because of all of the different medical groups that are involved — sometimes insurance doesn’t get billed for one, sometimes insurance won’t cover one, sometimes the hospital neglects to send a bill, and sometimes they just flat out don’t bother using the legal route and just send everyone to collections (I’ve had this happen three times). Springing medical debt on someone out of nowhere should be illegal — you know you have that $2500 Verizon bill but you may not have known that you had a doctor that wasn’t included in the bill to the insurance company.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 17:22:56 GMT

I did a quick Google and came up with this right away. Looks like this is not a new thing (article from 2007).

http://www.debthelp.com/kc/273-credit-triggers.html

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 17:50:33 GMT

No, the nine I paid we’re getting ready to start going on my report. They were just holding on to these debts and waiting.
I still have 14 medical collections on my report but they won’t PFD. Until they will delete, they will stay there

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 17:51:56 GMT

Did my homework
https://www.transunion.com/product/triggers

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 18:38:20 GMT

Interesting, learn something new everyday. Although I suspected something like this may happen, as no one wants to not get paid.

And I believe that I've had this happen to me, since I recently paid off a Loan. Got a letter for a judgement from an old Medical bill but listed no date. So it has to be from several years back, as I've been pretty proactive with my credit the last few years.

So they must have been sitting on this for a while, waiting for the right time. Nothing has hit my CR yet though.

I wonder if they're just fishing.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Peazmom — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 18:54:06 GMT

Interesting...a post I read a few weeks back now makes sense. The discussion revolved around applying for a Mortgage with a company you don't plan on going with shortly before apping with your preferred lender. The theory was the initial application would flush any dormant collections/debts out of the woodwork.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 20:13:02 GMT

The link you posted was one of the sources I found out from and one of the best. The last paragraph explains how it works specifically for “collections”.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

itlm062 — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 23:27:56 GMT

Wow, I guess it happened to us too.

My wife had a bogus medical collection under her name, we missed it while in BK(2011-2016, collection was in 2013).

It only reported to EXP and we are just waiting for it to drop off...supposdely 2020.

We just fininshed a refinance, one of the condition was to pay off this collection of $993.

We stood our ground and said we will not pay this collectoin and if they force us too, we will not do the refinance with them.

We just closed on 7/17/19, and on the same day, the collection showed up on her TU report...

Now I am just mad, and will try to find documentation on this stupid thing and see if I can do a proper dispute.

(medical bill, took ins company 6 months to pay, by then, they had turned it over to collection agency.)

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

NRB525 — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 01:24:58 GMT

This is probably a tool Barclays and Synchrony use to monitor cardholders, then shut them down after app sprees .

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Berk — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 16:29:15 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
.......Just wanted everyone to know about this shady tactic

I fail to see how this tactic is shady.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

GApeachy — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 06:31:30 GMT

It's shady in the fact that some bills, particularly medical, are known to fall through the cracks due to how Insurance handles/mishandles claims and also how medical billing companies miss their time frame for billing to the Ins. companies. (there are laws) These bits and pieces of info. is withheld from us and in the meantime, sold without our knowledge of said bills to a CA who then sits on it waiting for the right time to pounce. All collection should be reported immediately (via cr's or snail mail, or both) giving the debtor a chance to pursue the right avenues to handle correct and incorrect bills in a timely manner.

If CA can know all about us then we should be able to know All about us.

If anything, when a collection is bought they should notify owner of debt. Not all debt is our fault, look at like @Saeren said about incorrect handling of medical bills he's had to deal with. Humans still make mistakes in the billing department and everything should be notated for all, not just a select (paying preying predatory)few.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Berk — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 17:22:12 GMT

@GApeachy wrote:
It's shady in the fact that some bills, particularly medical, are known to fall through the cracks due to how Insurance handles/mishandles claims and also how medical billing companies miss their time frame for billing to the Ins. companies. (there are laws) These bits and pieces of info. is withheld from us and in the meantime, sold without our knowledge of said bills to a CA who then sits on it waiting for the right time to pounce. All collection should be reported immediately (via cr's or snail mail, or both) giving the debtor a chance to persue the right avenues to handle correct and incorrect bills in a timely manner.
If CA can know all about us then we should be able to know All about us.
If anything, when a collection is bought they should notify owner of debt. Not all debt is our fault, look at like @Saeren said about incorrect handling of medical bills he's had to deal with. Humans still make mistakes in the billing department and everything should be notated for all, not just a select (paying preying predatory)few.

Oh, I agree that the CA's are being stealthy in their dealings with us. However, the trigger reports are not a shady practice of the CRA's. And, yes, I've had medical bills where I only got the "final bill before being sent to collections" bill. Yes, medical billing needs reform. Many a good person's credit has been ruined due to unknown medical bills.

However, all the CA's are paying for is certain triggers in our credit reports - the same "triggers" that we can see in our own reports. It's not some conspiricy between the CRA's and CA's to ruin our credit. When I started rebuilding my credit, it took about 5 years before CA's once again started sending me collections notices. All had passed the statute of limitations so they didn't get anywhere but the collections started again because my financial situation had improved and the CA's thought they had a much better chance of bullying me into paying on zombie debt - some 30 years old. It's no different then one team scouting another to find weakness.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

GApeachy — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 17:29:46 GMT

@Berk wrote:
@GApeachy wrote:
All collection should be reported immediately (via cr's or snail mail, or both) giving the debtor a chance to persue the right avenues to handle correct and incorrect bills in a timely manner.

If anything, when a collection is bought they should notify owner of debt.

However, all the CA's are paying for is certain triggers in our credit reports - the same "triggers" that we can see in our own reports.

That's just it, CA's are paying for a service in order to pounce on the "Uninformed" while withholding info ie. unknown, unreported debt. There needs to be some leveling of the playing field. We should, like the CA's be able to subscribe somewhere to see if there is any outstanding debt. in our names.....but there are only limited avenues, while CA's get a lookie-looksie at your stuff to comtemplate a plan of attack.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

Berk — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 17:35:35 GMT

The CA’s get our debt info directly from the original creditor or from other CAs who sell our debt to them. They don’t have some super secret site provided by the CRAs that they can go to.

And, yes, medical debt is a huge mess right now and, we the consumer, end up paying a huge price because many times we are completely unaware of the debt until it is too late and it has gone to collections. That does need to be fixed.

Re: The secret Trigger Reports (Beware)

GApeachy — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 17:46:16 GMT

@Berk wrote:
The CA’s get our debt info directly from the original creditor or from other CAs who sell our debt to them. They don’t have some super secret site provided by the CRAs that they can go to.
.

But isn't that what we are talking about? (copy and paste) http://www.debthelp.com/kc/273-credit-triggers.html

'Credit trigger’ is a relatively new term in the financial world, but if you are not yet familiar with the concept then now is the time to learn. A quickly increasing trend fed by the three main consumer credit reporting agencies, credit triggers are alerts provided to paying lenders about the credit activities of their borrowers, or of potential future borrowers.

and....

Collections Assistance

Credit triggers labeled as collections assistance are provided to lenders or collections agencies based on your actions regarding other debts. If you begin paying off other debts, for example, then the collector or creditor will be informed that you have new funds with which to pay. Your lender will assume that if you can make payments on other debts, then it is a good time to press you for payments to him or her, as well.