Four years ago I did a legal name change, via a court order. After that, I got a new social security card (the s.s.n. number remained the same), a new passport, DL, and updated my name on all of my credit card and bank accounts and on my mortgage account that I had at the time. When I asked the credit card companies if I needed to to anything regarding updating my name with the credit bureaus, they told me "no". They said that they will keep reporting my credit card activity with the same s.s.n. and that the credit bureaus will understand that my name has changed and will add some field like "also known as" in their records. I maintained credit minitoring accounts with Experian and Transunion, and I noticed that they did just that with my credit file. However, as I found out later, Equifax did not. Over the period of four years all of my active credit cards have been reissued under my new name and eventually with new account numbers as well. In several cases (Citi and Barclays) the banks at some point changed the account numbers themselves, and with Chase I had some unauthorized transaction at some point show up and the card had to be cancelled and re-issued with a new account number for security reasons. As it turned out all these years my Equifax credit score was slowly going down due to inactivity. Right now I am in the process of buying an apartment. When I applied for a mortgage pre-approval, this issue came to light. The lender pulled my Equifax credit report and it came back with NO score at all. The lender called the Equifax business customer support and eventually was told something to the effect that my credit file went dormant due to lack of recent activity and that's why there was no score. At the same time my scores from Experian and Transunion were around 833, 834.
I then signed up with MyEquifax for their credit monitoring service to see what was going on. They showed me some kind of a simulated score of around 675 (!!). Moreover, none of the reissued cards under my new name were shown in the Equifax report and it was only showing old closed accounts, with one exception (a Discover account that I had not used in several years).
It tool me several days and hours on the phone with Equifax to get them to update my name. I had to provide them a ton of documents through their online dispute center. I had to talk to several supervisors since regular customer service reps there are almost completely useless. The supervisors are not much better. Their first attempt to change my name was done incorrectly: They changed the first name but not the last name and produced a weird hybrid. I had to call again, and eventually they did change my name to the correct one. BUT they neglected to add my previous name under "also known as"/"other names". So the next time I logged in and my credit report refreshed, my entire credit history disappered! The credit report was completely blank! Several more hours on the phone and they re-added my former name under "also known as"/"other names". My credit history came back. Then suddenly my (simulated) Equifax credit score jumped to 761, presumably because of the credit inquiries by the mortage lender. The lender tried to pull the report again, and it came back to him with a score, this time 775. I made a small charge to that Discover card and then two of the credit cards that I actively use (Barclays and Citi) posted their monthly statements, with small balances, $9 and $39, and they also showed up back on my Equifax report. The Citi Mastercard account is one of my older accounts, 26+ years, and as of now the simulated (shown to me) Equifax credit score is 832. It looks like my missing credit history is basically getting restored. However, I still can't belive that Equifax is so inept at handling name changes. People change names all the time. It's not a rare occurrence.
