Advice Needed - Fraud, Stolen Identity

I recently went through a credit check in preparation for a house purchase. It revealed a telephone or cell phone account that was in collection. After contacting the vendor and determining the collection agency, it was clearly not me who opened the account. In fact, the account was opened in GA - I have resided in VA since the age of eight. I have also ruled out family, friends etc. No one I know lives or works where the perp claimed when securing my credit.

I've contacted the collection agency 3 times - finally got a fraud package. After dispensing with the forms, I am going to go back on the vendor (the package revealed more account details that I didn't know) to try and get this cleared up.

Have any of you been through this before? Do you know of any laws, consumer protections etc. that I could use in expediting the return of my previously perfect credit? I am told that resolution can take 2 months even after you prove your "innocence". It doesn't seem right that a vendor can do a sloppy job of verifying soemone's creditworthiness and then stick someone else with the cleanup duty. I'm sure others out there would benefit from the discussion (esp. re: prevention).

I've been through it, and it took me almost two years to finally get it all straightened out. While dealing with the credit report folks, there was three that I dealt with. Each time I thought I had all of the erroneous charges taken off, it would turn out that only one or two would come off of my report and I would have to start over again. I finally started writing on the letters they sent me that it was not a charge that I made.

The best advise that I got was from other Freepers. When I started out there was about a dozen accounts that were not mine. The advise I got was to tell them all that if they didn't stop harassing me about charges and accounts that were not mine that I would have no other recourse than to sue them, as this was very upsetting for me, and they would have to produce in court the evidence that they thought they had to continue the harassment. Believe it or not they all started dropping me as a target. I knew they had no evidence, and I wish I had asked my Freeper friends sooner.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.