Weird Credit-related issue..

[Anonymous]

Hi, newbie here. I have a very unheard-of issue at hand. See my family moved to US about a year back. We hail from a country where people usually go by their middle names. Now this is causing us bit of a predicament here in US as me and my brother have same First name, Middle initial, same last name , and same address, but the credit beureaus think that we're both the same. Now it happens that every time my brother applies for an account, I get dinged and THE ACCOUNT STARTS REPORTING UNDER MY SSN! I tried talking to people at the credit beureaus and they were more like "how on earth is this possible???". I dont even know how to go about figuring how to solve this issue. Please help my soul

[haulingthescoreup]

Yikes! Welcome to the forums, and the US, by the way.

I'm trying to remember what CC application forms generally look like. Do they ever have the option for a full middle name, or are they generally just set up for an initial?

I wonder if one possible solution would be for your brother and you to each enter both your first and middle names, separated by a hyphen, in the first name block. This would depend on how long your names are, of course. But if one of you started going by James-Peter Jones and the other by James-Paul Jones (except using your actual names, obviously), that might make even the most dimwitted credit bureau acknowledge that they might need to use the SSN as a second verifier.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for replying! You know this kind of makes sense to me because I came across some dude yesterday and he suggested something like that too, but I wasnt buying his solution because he was some random person Anyways, hearing the same thing from a pro (like yourself) kinda works for me.

I actually wasted my whole day today just ringing up the three beureaus to get this thing solved. Funny part is, people at all three of them were going crazy over our case because first it was about the SSN mismatch then it somehow shifted to how the hell did I get 4 major CC within 4 months of establishing credit history..............its been a weird day today, trust me.

Anyways, thanks for replying!

EDIT: Credit apps usually ask for the middle initial and not for the whole middle name AFAIK.