...is usually the opening line for the snake-oil salesmen who claim they have found some magical way to wash away your bad credit. Call them, fork over a (often substantial) fee and Presto! your credit can be fixed.
Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware...
First and foremost, there is nothing these people can do for you that you can't do for yourself, and you can do it for a lot less. For instance, when a credit "repair" agency tells you it can write dispute letters to your creditors or a CRA to get negative entries removed, what they neglect to tell you is YOU can do the same thing yourself for the price of postage. These agencies make it sound like they have some sort of clout with the credit bureaus, when in actuality the reviewers at the CRAs can usually spot a dispute letter from these letter mills a mile away.
The credit repair companies also don't bother to tell you that saturating a CRA with dispute letters can and often does get you flagged as a fraudulent disputer. It's like being labeled "the boy who cries wolf." The "dispute anything that moves" approach to dispute letters not only fails, but it also greatly weakens your position if the "wolf" really does come to your door...like if a creditor does erroneously place an item on your credit report, or if your identity is stolen. "And this time, no one believed the boy..."
Another red flag of the credit repair snake-oil salesmen is to call themselves a "law office" or to state or imply that they are lawyers. Some do this because lawyers have an almost mystical aura about them in American society. Surely a lawyer can bring the lawsuit fire-stick to bear and strike the bad-credit enemy dead with a loud bang and puff of smoke, right? Wrong. Lawyers can do nothing to remove legitimate entries from your credit report. Now to be fair there are occasions where lawyers can play a legitimate role in correcting your credit report and defending your rights (like if a collection agency or other creditor violates the law). But there's nothing illegal about a company reporting you for stiffing them. Nothing, nada, zilch.
Be advised that discussions of, and links to, credit repair agencies are against the TOS here and will be removed. In these forums we discuss real, legal methods to improve your credit. We help people find genuine solutions. Snake-oil salesmen who claim to have discovered some occult secret to magically fixing your credit should go elsewhere.
