I'm stumped. I'm not so sure what is the answer. I'll do some research and get back to you if I bump into an anything. You should email the people at Lending Tree as they probably know..

Depends on what credit report you look at, here the history:.

TU: commencement of delinquency was 11/95 and charge off 5/96, so it fell off my report on 11/02... Sears reposted it with commencement of delinquency 7/96, charge-off 4/97 and close date of 10/02.

EXP: charge-off date 5/98; commencement of delinquency date 11/97..

EQ: date of last activity 7/96.....

I called and no one at Sears could give me any info about when it was C/O or went delinquent. I don't know WHAT to believe, but I know it wasn't closed in 10/2002, for certain! But I don't know if this would alter how the delinquencies appear... I'm going to go back to TU report and see if I can get a list of delinquency dates.....

EXACTLY as it appeared in OCTOBER... as I said, it expired due to 7 years, but then was reposted..

SEARS # REVOLVING ACCOUNT.

PURCHASED BY ANOTHER LENDER CHARGE ACCOUNT.

UPDATED 07/2002.

BALANCE: $0.

INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNT.

OPENED 07/1995.

MOST OWED: $1651.

CREDIT LIMIT: $0.

CLOSED 11/1995.

>STATUS AS OF 11/1995: COLLECTION ACCOUNT<.

AS IT APPEARS NOW:.

SEARS (Individual Account).

Account Type Revolving Account.

Credit Limit.

(High Credit).

$1,651.

Minimum Monthy Payment (Terms).

Date Opened July, 1995.

Date of Last Activity July, 1997.

Date Paid Out July, 1997.

Date Closed October, 2002.

Loan Type Charge Account.

Collateral.

Description Purchased by another lender..

It is obvious that the account has been re-aged. At least it appears to be a two month old account to the FICO scoring system. I also had a creditor try to do this to me a while back and there is an extensive post on how I handled it..

The most important thing would be if you have old reports showing the account the way it was previously being reported. It is hard to refute that kind of evidence. I used old reports and the Equifax "legal" department to get my re-aged tradeline deleted fairly quickly..

I tried to work this out with the creditor, but they were basically clueless and couldn't understand why I was so concerned that they updated the DOLA on the account. Equifax uses the DOLA date as their "date of status" for determining the account's age, so it dropped my score a full 100 points when they did that. Needless to say, I wasn't happy. After I nailed them on it and it was deleted, I got those 100 points back..

Let me know if I can be of any help dealing with this, as I have quite a bit of experience with this particular type of issue...

Jdog- did you send as a regular dispute to the CRA that eventually was sent to the legal department OR did you send letter directly to legal?..

Well, my situation is a little unique. I have already sued Equifax in the past, so now all of my disputes get automatically sent to the Equifax legal department. I have a person there that I usually contact. It is much more efficient for me to work this way now, since I pretty much have their undivided attention. I called my rep up on the phone, and told her the situation. She told me to fax in the documents I had, and then I called her back in a couple of days and she told me that "she had been instructed to delete the account".



Although you may not have this direct approach available to you (yet :) ), you can still get pretty good results by faxing or mailing your documented proof that the account has been reaged. They should take care of it because they will realize that they are making themselves very vulnerable to a lawsuit if they don't comply...