There is an industry that, even though it is regulated by federal legislation and has been helping consumers for decades, is among the most maligned in the country. Even though hundreds of thousands of people have been benefited by the services offered by the companies and individuals who comprise the industry, there are still people who are adamant that the entire industry is a farce and any company who is a part of it is a con-artist.
Looking at the title of this article, it’s pretty obvious the industry we are referring to is the credit repair industry. Despite the fact that the oldest credit repair companies have been around for 20 years, that credit repair services have helped Americans remove millions of negative items from their credit reports, and that the federal government created the Credit Repair Organizations Act in order to regulate credit repair companies and not to make them illegal, there are “experts” in the media, in major corporations, and in government positions that claim that any company who offers credit repair services is trying to take advantage of you.
There are logical reasons why so many people believe credit repair services are a scam. For starters, there have been far too many “credit repair” clinics that truly were out to dupe people. These clinics promised the world but ended up just taking people’s money or in some cases getting them involved in credit repair schemes that were illegal. Left and right people desperate to improve their credit scores were getting suckered by these con jobs to the point that the media and legal attention these clinics received was large enough to put a shroud over the entire industry. Instead of spending the time to separate the good companies from the bad, many people opted to accept that the entire industry was fraudulent.
And once this conclusion is made, it is easy to find supporting evidence because there are some pretty massive institutions that want people to believe that credit repair services are not to be trusted. And who are these institutions? They are the credit bureaus who maintain your credit file and the lenders who use your credit score. The credit bureaus do not want people to try to repair their credit report. It is bad for business. The credit bureaus make their money by collecting information about you, assembling it in a report, and then selling it. Credit repair causes them to have to do additional work that costs them money and when you are managing hundreds of millions of credit reports, that cost would be extremely high if everyone out there started trying to clean up their credit. On the other hand, many lenders such as credit card companies don’t want you to clean up your credit because if you increase your credit score, they won’t be able to demand as high of interest payments. So, given the scale of the entities that would prefer you didn’t repair your credit and the fact that their profits are on the line, it is little wonder that when people look to confirm their concerns about credit repair services, they are able to find plenty of information. Also factor in the huge budgets these organizations can dedicate to lobbying lawmakers and seeding stories in media outlets and it’s clear why the amount of anti-credit repair information dwarfs the voice of the pro-credit repair crowd.
When looking at all these factors it is easy to see why so many people believe that there is no such thing as credit repair and why it is so difficult to convince them otherwise.
Someday the situation may change. As more and more people are able to successfully increase their credit score with help from credit repair companies there is a broader base of people who know credit repair works to contend with the population that believes it does not. But until there are enough success stories to make a difference, the people who do their research, find a reputable credit repair service, and work to fix their credit will be the fortunate few because their credit scores will be that much higher than those of the people who will do nothing.
