Stay Safe: Get an Updated Credit Report—For Free

Because it's so important, I'm going to flip this post around from my usual format and start with the advice: Check your credit reports from the three reporting bureaus once per year, every year. Just go to annualcreditreport.com and provide the information required, and check to make sure you aren't being financially victimized. (It's free, once a year, by the way.) To make it easy to remember, set a recurring event in your calendar application. This way you won't forget.

My reminder went off two days ago and last night I started poking around to see if anything had changed in the last year. Turns out it certainly had. Someone with a sort-of similar name to me had ended up merged into my credit history. Amazingly, I now had two Social Security Numbers, a new date of birth, about 15 aliases, and a mess of bad credit issues due to an emergency room visit in a city I'd never been to.

After an hour on the phone with the hospital and the credit agency, I think we got it worked out. I'm still waiting on the revised report to be sent back, which removed 63 incorrect items tied to my doppelganger and, hopefully, left my credit intact. And by all accounts this is not a case of malicious identity theft, but rather a simple mistake. Can you imagine how things could have gone if the other Chris had intended to take advantage of this situation?

This incident has been devastatingly eye-opening. Like most people, I didn't think it was possible that two people's financial lives could become intertwined this way. Our names aren't that similar, after all, and we have much different SSNs. And yet someone, somewhere, decided that we must be the same person. That frightens me more than Jason, Freddy, and Chucky combined.

The good news is that the issue was (fingers crossed) relatively easy to remedy. Once I found Experian's get-a-real-human phone number (email me if you need it), a representative was understanding and quick to repair the problems, though I was never offered an apology or even a suggestion that anyone in this chain had done anything wrong aside from me.

The bad news is that, for some reason, I can't get online reports for the other two agencies. One directs me to request it in writing, the other is locked behind a password it says I have but which I have no record of. Not a good sign.

Here's hoping for a clean credit report in the next few weeks.

Got your own credit mix-up to share or vent about? The comments below are the place to do it!