bizarro world of credit reports

[Anonymous]

I recently sent for my credit report, my mothers and my wife, all by snail mail.

I have a joint Discover credit card with my mother and put my wife on as an AU.

My mothers Experian report shows me and wife as a Joint holder on the Discover card, but CK Transunion report shows my wife as an AU and myself as Joint, which is correct.

And for some weird reason, the Experian report had my mother's last name very misspelled on who it was Prepared for and addressed to, but NOT on the area where they list Personal information and various names. How does that happen?

I have looked on line at my own Experian report over a year ago, it's conflated with my father, showing a lot of closed credit cards I never owned. I only sent the snail mail request for all of three of my credit reports a few days ago, so it will take a few weeks to get them back.

Transunion sent back a request for proof of address on my wife, as they said they don't have an address on-file. However, on CK Transunion credit report, they DO show her correct address on file,

Not at all sure how TU can have an address on file when I use CK to look at the TU report, but NOT on file when I request her annual credit report. It would appear that the address information AnnualCreditReport.com has is NOT the same as what TU has. BTW, my wife has 3 credit cards in her name.

We pay a lot of attention to credit scores, but the real problem can lay with what info they have in the report. Yet, it's hard for me to get upset about it all since all I and my mother have FICO 8 scores of 780+ and my wife has a FICO 8 credit score of 730, understandable since my wife's AAoA FICO 8 is 1 year. Though her Vantage 3 AAoA is 7 years.

It certainly pays to look at all the details of one;s credit reports from all 3 CRAs. Not to mention, there are other CRA we seldom hear about.

I am really just venting as I really never knew the information in credit reports was so unreliable.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Not at all sure how TU can have an address on file when I use CK to look at the TU report, but NOT on file when I request her annual credit report. It would appear that the address information AnnualCreditReport.com has is NOT the same as what TU has. BTW, my wife has 3 credit cards in her name.

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Does anyone know, why when I request a CR from TU through annual report.com, they said they did not have the address on file, but when I look at the TU CR from CK, they have the address listed in their credit file?

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Not at all sure how TU can have an address on file when I use CK to look at the TU report, but NOT on file when I request her annual credit report. It would appear that the address information AnnualCreditReport.com has is NOT the same as what TU has. BTW, my wife has 3 credit cards in her name.

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Does anyone know, why when I request a CR from TU through annual report.com, they said they did not have the address on file, but when I look at the TU CR from CK, they have the address listed in their credit file?

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Somewhat conjecture based on observations over time: I don't think the third party monitoring sites pull the main database.  I think there's a secondary database or a non-trivial cache that refreshes a few days later and sometimes the data in that is not one to one... this is especially true in TU's case.

annualcreditreport.com is the reference source: if it's not there, it's not on the real report is the way I look at it.

[Anonymous]

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@Revelate wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Not at all sure how TU can have an address on file when I use CK to look at the TU report, but NOT on file when I request her annual credit report. It would appear that the address information AnnualCreditReport.com has is NOT the same as what TU has. BTW, my wife has 3 credit cards in her name.

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Does anyone know, why when I request a CR from TU through annual report.com, they said they did not have the address on file, but when I look at the TU CR from CK, they have the address listed in their credit file?

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Somewhat conjecture based on observations over time: I don't think the third party monitoring sites pull the main database.  I think there's a secondary database or a non-trivial cache that refreshes a few days later and sometimes the data in that is not one to one... this is especially true in TU's case.

annualcreditreport.com is the reference source: if it's not there, it's not on the real report is the way I look at it.

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@Revelate

Update on this.

It appears that annualcreditreport.com does not check TU when they say TU does not have your address on file.  It appears that maybe annualcreditreport.com is updated once a year at best about names/addresses.

The reason I said this, when I got the smail  mail saying TU did not have my wifes address on file, the TU letter suggested I could sign up directly at TU for their score and report.  It's only $1 for 7 days then you get charged $20 a month if you don't cancel for montly service. Which BTW is a huge disappointment,  TU only gave a Vantage 3 score and not a real CRA report, more like a summary that is the same exact thing that CK gives for free.

So I can get poor service (Vantage 3 and not a full credit report) if I pay for it with TU and her address is on file, but if I want to get a CR for free from annualcreditreport.com then her address isn't on file.  ??

So I will send by mail verfication of address to annualcreditreport.com, which BTW isnt' actually that easy as my wife only has a drivers license, no utitilty bills in her name  and everthing else is done paperless, and you can't print a bank statement from a bank website to prove address.   She quit her job which was direct deposit, we did have a pay stub that I will use but in 2 months that won't work either,  it will be to old.

This is the first time I have encountered a problem with going paperless, you can't prove your address. 

[Revelate]

Or just open up a dispute on TU and see what address is actually on there /shrug.

I sincerely doubt annualcreditreport is wrong.

[Anonymous]

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@Revelate wrote:

Or just open up a dispute on TU and see what address is actually on there /shrug.

I sincerely doubt annualcreditreport is wrong.

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When I check the TU CR using the TU website and paying for a report, it has my wifes correct address, so I can't open a dispute.

When I sent a request into annualcreditreport, I got a letter that said TU didn't have her address on file.  (And I have yet to get a response from annualcreditreport about EQ and EX, and CK only generates a credit file for TU, nothing for EQ.

Her CR is brand new as of a year ago, she has only had a SS number for 3 years, so I wasn't that surprised about EQ.

I wasn't saying annualcreditreport is wrong, I was speculating that the simplist explainatation is that they have a database containing the names and address of people with credit files that they get suplied from the 3 CRAs and that this information isn't current. 

The only other theory is overly convoluted, like TU itself has multiple databases which aren't kept in sync. .

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Revelate wrote:

Or just open up a dispute on TU and see what address is actually on there /shrug.

I sincerely doubt annualcreditreport is wrong.

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When I check the TU CR using the TU website and paying for a report, it has my wifes correct address, so I can't open a dispute.

When I sent a request into annualcreditreport, I got a letter that said TU didn't have her address on file.  (And I have yet to get a response from annualcreditreport about EQ and EX, and CK only generates a credit file for TU, nothing for EQ.

Her CR is brand new as of a year ago, she has only had a SS number for 3 years, so I wasn't that surprised about EQ.

I wasn't saying annualcreditreport is wrong, I was speculating that the simplist explainatation is that they have a database containing the names and address of people with credit files that they get suplied from the 3 CRAs and that this information isn't current. 

The only other theory is overly convoluted, like TU itself has multiple databases which aren't kept in sync. .

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Based on what many people have seen, this is actually accurate.

Given their dataset size, and their business model: it's how I'd design it... though I'd probably recommend doing a better job keeping them in sync .  TU appears to be the worst from an infrastructure perspective TBH, numerous stories on the forums of stupid things happening (like derogatories being deleted but then magically repappearing every so often in the TU monitoring solution but they're never there on annualcreditreport or via a dispute).

The pay for report may not be the same as a dispute TBH... disputes and also annualcreditreport have ramifications if they're using the wrong information, a report that you pay for, not so much as there's recourse (namely, a dispute hah).  It'd be sort of foolish and wasteful from that perspective to use the same near real time infrastructure the lenders use for frequent requests from credit monitoring solutions.

[RobertEG]

Annualcreditreprot.com does not maintain its own separate database.

It is merely an administrative portal that was created, with approval of the FTC, as a means for the big-3 CRAs to meet the statutory requriment for providing a free annual report to consumers.

It must verify that the requesting party is the actual named consumer, as it provides info, such as soft pulls, that are restricted only to view by the actual named consumer.

It then, once the admin requriments of determining the identity of the inquiree have been met and it has been verified that a year has passed since the last freebie, provides access to each CRA database and produces a report.

[Anonymous]

Update

I am embarrassed to admit, but I think this confusion was caused by me.

I used the mail in form, which requires you to use all capital letters on the request.

I requested reports for three different people and got them for one.

My name is John, but I noticed on the letter for more information, it is addressed to Joan. Likely I used a small h instead of a H, and a computer scanned and read my request, interpreted the "h" as an "A", and wrote a computerizer letter asking for more information.

As for my wife, her name is correct but the street address on the letter requesting more information isn't, likely I wrote i instead of I, as the street wasn't entirely correct, though good enough for the post office.

l re-entered my request Via phone, it seemed to work well for me, but my wife has an odd first name and it seemed to give the computer more trouble. Not sure if it worked for her, but I will see in a few days.

The reason I went this route, I have had problems getting reports from all three CRA online for my wife a few months ago, and when I printed my experian report from online the print was a little messed up with double printing, not sure why, you can read it but it's hard to read. So I thought this time, just let them print it and send via mail.

But recently, rather than printing files out on paper, I have taken to print to file which creates a print image on my computer, easier to keep it and doesn't waste a lot of paper with these long credit files.

If there is any moral to this story, these sorts of errors often happen because of these sorts of reasons.