
Identity Theft and Child Support
Evening all,
Was not sure where to post this question. Not totally about my budget although it is going to impact it in the near future.
Yesterday as part of my year end personal clean up I went to pull a copy of my credit report to check for mistakes and out of date information. I was not able to verify online as the questions about open accounts did not match anything that I had. A call to Equafax and they could not verify me over the phone. I am mailing copies of my driver’s license, social security card and a couple of bills to prove address in the morning.
So this evening I went to the Child Support website to check that the extra payment that I had sent had posted. There were payments from income withholding's and I am disabled and not working. Seems that whoever is using my SSN is also getting hit with the child support order. I had to laugh.
Got a question and I will be talking to the child support agency on Wednesday, tomorrow is a holiday also for them, about this. I was wondering if anyone knew if those payments will count or will they remove them later and go back to the true amount? Will I get a penalty for this? At this rate the back amount will be paid off 4 months faster than I had projected.
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Ugh, I am so sorry this has happened to you. At least you caught it before it became an even bigger deal.
Child support laws vary from state to state, so it is hard to know how your state will handle the situation. In most cases, though, a state's child support enforcement division is very willing to work with you to make sure payments are credited correctly, and that if you want extra payments to go to any back-amounts owed, they can arrange that.
Let us know how it went. It sounds like you might need to arrange an appointment to go in and see them with all of your supporting documents. Best of luck!
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This is frustrating. Did you happen to initially access your credit report from www.annualcreditreport.com? That is the site that gives you access to credit reports from all 3 bureaus (Transunion, Equifax, and Experian) for free. If so, you might run into the same problem as you did before.
It looks like this will be an exercise in hurry up and wait.
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UPDATE:
Well I finally heard back from Equafax and got a copy of my credit report. There is nothing on there that I did not recognize. Now when I sent them photocopies of my id's I also sent address history for 20+ years, that long only because when I hit 9 years I had lived at one address for 12+ years. So it might have been like the agent on the phone said and they just had some wrong info on my report.
I did finally get a credit freeze on my file. Now the interesting thing about that is that it is good for 90 days but renewable, but entitles you to a free credit report every quarter from all 3 agencies. Just thought that I would pass that tid bit along to you all.