Released: December 28, 2006

Credit agencies lag on errors, fraud

Source: Beth Healy, Boston Globe

Eric W. Carroll’s credit report says he has a home in Florida, a wife named Katrina, and a pile of unpaid bills.

He first learned this when a debt collector called him in 2002, dialing his apartment in Bridgewater, yet asking for an Eric W. Carroll from Avon Park, Fla. Carroll insisted there was some mistake: He was not married, and he had never lived in Florida.

Nearly five years later, collectors are still hounding the wrong Eric Carroll.

The details of his financial life have been hopelessly interwoven with those of another man by the same name, a man who appears, in credit reports, to have stiffed more than two dozen creditors, from banks to utilities, and has a history of bouncing checks. As a result, the Massachusetts Eric Carroll, living in Newton with his fiancee Nancy and their new baby, can’t get a mortgage, can’t rent an apartment in his own name, and last July could not buy an engagement ring without his father’s help.

“I felt this big,” said Carroll, 29, pinching together his thumb and forefinger. “It literally ruins your life.”

SPOTLIGHT: Debtors’ hell

Carroll was one of scores who contacted the Globe after a Spotlight Team report this summer on debt collection abuses. Many felt victimized by the power and ruthless tactics of debt collectors. But Carroll and others complained of another maddening aspect of the system: The glacial and ineffectual response of the three giant keepers of consumer credit records - Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion - to any errors in their files, even those that appear to result from fraud.

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