I signed up a Year ago. - Posted by NeilH
Posted by NeilH on February 19, 2002 at 10:21:37:
And will be glad to share the results.
I will start by saying that 2 years ago my Beacon (Equifax credit score) was 483 and that now it’s 680. 483 is terrible. If you decided to start trashing your credit today just for fun, I think you would find it hard to get it that low.
The reasons include a 1998 Bankruptcy and about 24 actual mistakes related to the bankruptcy. (Showed balances owed that should have been $0).
Prior to signing up with ICR, I submitted several letters and online forms to Equifax in an attempt to have the mistakes removed or corrected. The results were pretty good. In almost all cases, the mistakes were fixed or item was deleted and my score quickly made it very close to the 600-610 ranges.
So at that point, I kind of felt that I could not really make any more improvements myself and figured why not give ICR a try (I had not done any work on my trans union and experian reports at that point).
I was a very irate customer after about the first four months. They lost my credit reports and I had to send in another set. It took almost a month for the second set to finally get into their system. (Approximately the end of the 4th month.) Customer Service was, in my experience, really bad. It was almost impossible to find out the status of anything.
BUT. Let me tell you what they did for me in the end. First of all, they were able to get about 6 additional items removed. Second, they fixed some things that I did wrong on my Equifax report investigations. Let me give an example. On all of those old bankruptcy accounts, I checked Equifax?s multiple choice box “included in bankruptcy”, so even though I was happy that they changed the balances to 0, my report had the word bankruptcy written all over it, over and over. Maybe that doesn?t factor in too much to a credit scoring system, but it sure looked scarier to a lender than it does now. What ICR was able to do was to have the “included in Bankruptcy” notation changed to “paid as agreed” on ALL of my OLD accounts.
They were not able to remove my bankruptcy from my report, however there is repossession that in no longer on there. That is amazing.
So, I would say that if your credit just has a few little problems try doing it yourself. If you?re too busy or have really bad credit I think it’s worth it. They are definitely not a ?scam?, I think they are just unorganized. Maybe they have improved. Ironically, one of the reasons I signed up for ICR instead of other services I found, was because they had you pay upfront and there was no monthly ?retainer? like other repair companies that I found. I thought that the retainer arrangement would give the company an incentive to drag the process out. LOL!
I read the lawsuit. I think that people just really have their guard up when it comes to “credit repair” because it is so connected to the word scam. Heck, I would have joined these plaintiffs after that fourth month I told you about (because of no customer service and at that point I had seen no evidence of any credit repair being done).
Hopefully this information will help someone.