Credit Rating Gone Wrong

Hi David,

My partner and I have recently moved in together in a rental property. We are very interested in hearing about owning our own home. I have thoroughly looked into it and keep getting told no. My partner has recently gone onto wages in the last couple of months and usually brings home approx. $1100 per week whilst I have always been on wages and bring home $539 per week.

My partner has a bad credit rating from a phone bill through Telstra which we believe not to be his. It is to the value of approx. $2500. We have tried and tried to get to the bottom of this with no avail. We have repeatedly requested a copy of the bill and all we get is a print out from Alliance Factoring with a $0 balance at the top of every page. This bad credit rating will be gone by Christmas 2008.

We are at the end of our tether and didn't want to rent at all but had no choice. I am 31 and he is 29 and we want to start a family and have a home of our own. Who would have thought that was too much too ask.

Is there any advice you can give us to help us out of this horrible situation. My credit rating is clear, I have no defaults. I have a car loan with a balance of $2800. Thank-you for your time David,

Kind Regards,

Clarissa

This is very disturbing information. If it was not your partner's phone bill that has caused all the problems we should all be pretty concerned about the possible implications this has for everyone! It is quite possible that identity fraud is the cause of this dilemma. Someone else has used your partners identity details to obtain phone services and has then disappeared.

The people who are responsible for keeping credit file records that you need to talk to are at 'Veda Advantage' (was Baycorp) on 1300 762 207 (Australia).

Veda Advantage have a monitoring service for $40 a year. Every time something changes on your Credit Report they notify you of the change. This would have allowed you to know the moment the above problem occurred. You could have gotten on to it straight away rather than now going through the problems you have had.

There is another avenue you can try as well. A company called Credit Repair will help get to the bottom of the problem and remove any incorrect information from your file. However you need to be aware that it will cost you money to get them to look into this, but it might be money well spent if you can turn your rent payments into mortgage repayments.

I received the following information from one of my readers after first publishing the information above.

I read the story "credit rating gone wrong" (above) with interest as I work as a Telstra fraud investigator and deal with people having stolen Id and investigating wrong default listing. I agree, it can be hell when one is a victim of identity theft. It's very rare we find the perpetrators, but we offer to help the victim as best we can. People are very quick to place blame with Telstra but more than often Telstra is also the victim.

In this day and age everyone should be security conscience and aware who they give out their personal information too.