My spouse has been in the process of trying to remove an erroneous negative tradeline from Citibank from his credit reports. When we got married 3 years ago, we paid off his cards and canceled all of them. Six months after we called to cancel the Citibank card, it was charged a $5.00 inactivity fee; no statements were ever mailed to us and eventually, late fees began to snowball without our knowledge. He received a call from Citibank notifying him of the situation; he explained what happened, they removed the charges, canceled the account, and promised any derogatories would be removed from his credit reports. We should have followed up 3 years ago but just assumed, as we were instructed, that the problem was resolved. It was dumb on our part but now we know to not take anyone's word over the phone.
We just recently checked his credit reports and all three showed a severe 150 day late status for this card -- It's showing up as closed with a $0 balance, so the fees were canceled by Citibank. He called Citibank a few weeks ago and was instructed, because the account was closed several years ago, to dispute the tradeline with the 3 agencies. He filed disputes with all three CRA's and just received the results of the investigations.
Two of the CRA's investigated and removed all derogatory information. The other, verified it.
What's the best way to handle the situation? Should he ask for the verified information be re-investigated or just contact Citibank again? We're a little worried that if we contact Citibank, there's a chance they might somehow override the CRA investigations and put the derogatories back on the other two credit reports. Is this a possibility?
Between the two of us, it's the only negative information on either of our credit reports. But it's definitely a bad one.
Message Edited by kb01 on 02-24-2010 08:26 AM
