My partner had some fraudulent activity on her credit card, which took her over the credit limit.
The bank concerned (Sainsbury’s) has refunded all the fraudulent transactions and the account is now back in order. However her credit file is showing that she was overdrawn on her account, which I assume will negatively affect her credit.
Sainsbury’s have said that they are unable to update the balance on her file. I was under the impression that they should be able to amend it.
Anyone been in a similar situation and have any advice please?
Contact Experian, Equifax and Transunion and ask them to amend your file. They will then reach out to the lender and give them a few weeks to respond (I don’t remember exactly how long).
In my case the bank never responded and the account in question was removed without further questions.
Edit: Thinking about it I think the CRAs actually removed the account as soon as I reached out so I didn’t need to wait for the banks response. I could remember it wrong though.
Give it another month; a lot of legacy banks push to CRAs only once a month and CRAs themselves might only update the reports monthly. You’re not the first one to have fraud on their cards so I assume there is already an automated process to deal with that and it might just take time.
But if after a couple months it’s still not resolved (or if you need credit urgently) then yes contact the credit bureaus individually (get a “statutory credit report” first which displays the raw data and might be more up to date instead of services like Credit Expert, Credit Karma, etc).
I would also check for CIFAS markers, these are there to highlight when a person has been a victim of fraud or potentially could be.
The reason it the marker will mean future requests can be more stringent, in terms of ID verification.
I’d also avoid a correction notice. This is a written statement that is applied to the file but it means the end of automated credit checking as they have to review the notice.
This post reminded me to check my credit file - I’ve been battling for MONTHS now to try and get NewDay to accept that I don’t owe them over 7 Quadrillion Pounds!
Sadly though their customer services and first line debt collectors are outsourced so go with what’s on the computer screen. They call me up to ask when I’m paying back £7,365,110,000,121,300.00 and they can’t even say such a big number in words.
I’ve been waiting for a British person to take one look at it and realise what’s gone wrong. Sadly it’s not a simple mail-merge error between name and account number as this image suggests as it’s updated in their system as my owed balance and I’ve now received default sums for over a billion quid minimum payment and after seeing this went to check my credit file and low and behold; the 7 Quadrillion is there as well. Time to go to the Ombudsman I think!
/facepalm
At this point it might be worth just going to the media. If anything it’ll make an entertaining story (I’d pay good money - though maybe not 7 quadrillion pounds - to hear the call recording for this… surely no debt collector would be able to keep a straight face when collecting such an absurd amount? ).
In this case I’d be very surprised if anything makes it onto your credit report though, there must be maximum values allowed for the data (for technical reasons) and it would break in all kinds of interesting ways if they tried to report a default for such a debt.
I do wonder what CS people are thinking when they insist things like that are correct. Even if they don’t have the power to fix it themselves they could escalate to someone that does… but that would actually be helpful, so it’s easier to say ‘pay one billion pounds!’ and chalk it up as a successful call.
).