Remember the Bad Jennifer Ellis? Sure you do. If you don’t, you can catch up here and here. I’ll wait.
Ready?
Well, I got another call today. The person on the call, who is from the folks trying to recover/collect for a Ford Focus, insisted they had two social security numbers now. That only sort of hit my brain, as I got pretty irritated with the woman for refusing to listen as I tried to explain, as usual, that I am not the Bad Jennifer.
Well, after I hung up on her, because she yelled at me, I called Ford, spoke to two different people, and got my information removed, yet again.
My next step was to pull my credit report. First report, fine. Second report, 18 negative items. WHAT?
I start looking in detail. There are actual judgments, all sorts of collections, and goodness knows what else.
Somehow I did not hyperventilate, but managed to call Experian.
Anyway, it seems the Bad Jennifer Ellis and I have similar social security numbers, and of course similar names. I think we might even have the same middle name, but for spelling.
This is what caused the problem. At some point someone made a typo and put both of our social security numbers together. You look up either one of us, you get my good credit combined with her…not so good credit. The last time I checked my credit, which was after all of the calls started, this wasn’t the case, so I had no way of knowing what the problem was. Now at least I know why there is a problem, but I don’t really know how it happened except someone made a mistake somewhere and messed with my life. Experian is the only credit report showing the problem right now, so I don’t know if the problem originated there, or I can expect a problem in the future with the other two agencies.
A lovely woman named Mary from Experian removed the Bad Jennifer’s social security number. We had to go address by address so we could make certain any addresses not related to me got removed. We also had to look at jobs. It was easy for Mary to remove all of the negative information belonging to Bad Jennifer except for one item. She has a judgment against her. To fix that, Mary has to get in touch with the Court that controls the judgment to confirm it isn’t actually mine. I think I will get in touch with the court as well, just to make sure it goes along properly. I hope I don’t have any trouble getting Bad Jennifer’s judgment removed from my credit.
Wow. What a mess.
I am glad I found out now when I have time to fix it, and not when I am in the middle of applying for a mortgage or something.