My partner has found an unknown default on her credit report from experian. Basically she wanted to re- mortgage and move to a bigger property , she thought her credit report was spotless , mortgage , credit card , all paid up fully and ontime. She just also completed her car finance. The first thing was on Friday when she got a letter from mbna saying that are reducing her credit facility greatly ( from 5000 to 1200 ) which she thought odd as she pays her balance every month. Then she thought ok , I will pay that off and get a new card. She applied to Barclays who she has a current account with and got declined. Now she was panicing.

We checked her report on experian last night and there is a default on there from orange. An account was opened last October and never paid , in May this year they defaulted the account. Now as far as I can gather she has either been the victim of fraud , or it could be a family member. Her eldest daughter went back to Uni last October. She probably had access to ennough information to be able to open an acccount in her mums name. My partner has a mobile account with t-mobile and everything else on her file is spotless as she thought.

She is going to call orange with the limited information she has to see what they say but I was just wondering if there was anything else we can do . There is no point her progressing with a re-mortgage as the Abbey will just refuse her ( through no fault of her own ) Do you think there is any chance the default could be removed??

J

Hi jasekent,

It is not unknown for spurious entries to be placed on credit files.

You should contact orange and try to resolve this directly. You should also contact Experian to notify them that the marker is in dispute. Experian will not remove it without notification from Orange but should place an "in dispute" note against the marker.

If you can resolve this with Orange then all well and good.

If not, then the Information Comissioners Office (www.ico.gov.uk) are the regulator for the Data Protection Act. They should take up your cause and deal direct with Orange. You will need to get some detail from Orange to make a complaint and the process will be slow as the ICO is experiencing a heavy workload at present.

The alternative is to seek a court order for removal of the marker (injunction). You can threaten to begin with but you may need to go to court for this.

The above is a reasonable sequence of actions:

Talk to Orange & Experian.

Go to the ICO.

Enforcement via injunction.

Since this constitutes identity theft, and the consequences can be severe, you might want to discuss this with the daughter before to take a more heavy handed approach. Also, if it isn't the daughter, you might want to contact the police/ CAB and get advice on how to prevent any further activity. If it is an unknown party using your identity then there could be other activity that should be blocked before it becomes more serious.

Not wanting to scare you but if you go OTT now, it might prevent more heartache later.

Hope this helps

S