The honest list
What we can and cannot do.
This is the page most credit repair sites do not have, and it is the reason we would rather you read this one before any of the others. Nothing here is a sales argument. Some of it argues against buying anything from us at all.
What nobody can do
Not us, not the most expensive firm in Ohio, not the one on the radio. If someone offers you any of these, they are either mistaken or breaking the law, and either way you should keep your money.
Cannot remove accurate, verifiable information
This is the whole thing, so it goes first. If a late payment, a charge-off, a collection or a bankruptcy is genuinely yours and the furnisher can verify it, it stays until it ages off. There is no letter, no loophole, no fee and no friend at the bureau that changes this. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying to you or about to.
Cannot promise you a score, a number of points, or a date
It is unlawful for a credit repair organisation to make an untrue or misleading representation about what it can do, and a promised result is exactly that. The honest reason is simpler than the legal one: scoring models are proprietary, your file changes every month, and anybody quoting you "+120 points in 90 days" is quoting a number they invented.
Cannot charge you before the work is done
Not a deposit, not a setup fee, not a monthly fee paid in advance, not a "file activation" charge. The Credit Repair Organizations Act prohibits taking payment until the promised services have been fully performed. If any company asks you for money up front, you have learned everything you need to know about that company.
Cannot get you a new credit identity, an EIN to borrow on, or a "CPN"
A credit privacy number is not a legal product. The nine-digit numbers sold as CPNs are, in practice, stolen Social Security numbers — often a child's. Using one on a credit application is fraud, and it is the applicant who is prosecuted, not the person who sold it. If anyone offers you one, walk out.
Cannot run a "credit sweep" or bury the bureaus in disputes
Mass-disputing every negative item as fraud when it is not is a false statement, and it does not work: bureaus flag repetitive template disputes as frivolous and stop investigating, which burns the one real tool you had. Worse, filing a false identity theft report is a federal offence.
Cannot stop a lawful garnishment, a foreclosure or a repossession
Credit repair concerns what is reported about a debt, not the debt itself. If you are being sued, garnished, foreclosed on or evicted, you need a lawyer today, not us. Legal Aid of Cleveland takes many of these cases free of charge and we will help you make the call.
Cannot settle, consolidate or negotiate down what you owe
That is debt settlement, and it is a different business with different risks. It usually means stopping payments while fees accumulate, it damages credit badly, and forgiven balances can be taxable. We do not do it, we do not refer for a commission, and we will say plainly if we think you should be looking at it — or at bankruptcy — instead of at us.
What we can do
All of it is work you could do yourself with time and a steady stomach. What you are buying is the time, the second pair of eyes, and somebody who has read a thousand of these.
Can read all three of your reports with you, properly
Equifax, Experian and TransUnion hold different data. We pull all three, and we go through them line by line until you can say what every entry is, who owns it, and the month it drops off. Most people have never had anyone do this with them, and it is the single most useful hour of the whole thing.
Can find the errors — and there are usually some
Accounts that are not yours. A balance you paid three years ago. A collection listed twice because it was sold on. A date of first delinquency that has been quietly reset, which would keep the item on your file years longer than the law allows. A mixed file, where somebody with a similar name has landed on yours.
Can dispute the inaccurate entries under the FCRA, and see it through
A dispute is free and you can file it yourself. What we add is knowing what to say, sending it to the furnisher as well as the bureau, keeping the paperwork, reading the response properly, and escalating when the answer is a form letter that did not address the point.
Can make a collector prove a debt is yours
Under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act you can demand validation, and if you do it within 30 days of their first contact they must stop collection until they answer. Many old, resold debts cannot be validated. Many can. Either way you find out what you are dealing with.
Can tell you exactly when each negative item falls off
Most negative information comes off seven years after the date of first delinquency. A Chapter 7 bankruptcy goes ten years from filing. Once you have those dates written down, a lot of the fear goes out of the file, because it stops being permanent and starts being a calendar.
Can help you rebuild the parts that actually move
Payment history and how much of your available credit you are using are, between them, most of a FICO score. A secured card used lightly and paid in full. A credit-builder loan. Getting a utilisation number under about 30 per cent, and ideally well under. Slow, dull, and the only thing that reliably works.
Can sit with you and a budget that survives contact with real life
Including the part where the car needs tyres in March. A plan you abandon in six weeks has done nothing for your credit and quite a lot to your morale.
Why this page exists
Because the lie is the business model.
Credit repair is a field with real, useful, boring work in it, and a large fringe of people selling a miracle. The miracle is always the same shape: a claim that accurate negative information can be made to disappear, wrapped in urgency and a fee taken up front. It is not a grey area and it is not a difference of opinion. It is the specific conduct the Credit Repair Organizations Act was written in 1996 to stop, and it is what the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau still bring cases about.
The people it works on are not gullible. They are exhausted. Someone who has spent a year being handed from department to department will pay $700 to make it stop, and the companies that take that money know exactly who they are calling.
So we put the limits on the front page, in the same type size as everything else. If that costs us a client who wanted to be told a nicer story, that is a fair trade. We would rather be the practice you came back to in two years than the one you regret.
A short decoder
Things you will hear elsewhere, and what they actually mean.
None of these is a subtle sign. Each one, on its own, is enough to end the conversation.
We remove all negative items, guaranteed.
Means: either they intend to dispute accurate entries as fraudulent, which is a false statement made in your name, or they intend to take your money and send three template letters. A guarantee of a result is prohibited outright.
Just the enrolment fee to get your file opened today.
Means: an advance fee, under a different name. No fee of any kind may be charged before the promised services have been fully performed. There is no version of this that is lawful, including one framed as a monthly subscription paid ahead.
We can get you a clean file with a CPN.
Means: they are about to sell you somebody else’s Social Security number, frequently a child’s. Using it to apply for credit is fraud, and it is you who is charged. There is no lawful “credit privacy number” for consumer credit.
Pay-for-delete: we’ll get the collector to erase it if you settle.
Means: a promise nobody controls. Furnishers agree by contract to report accurately, most refuse, and even where a collector does delete, the original creditor’s entry usually stays. Paying a collection can be a good decision; it is not a deletion strategy.
Our attorney-backed method uses a loophole the bureaus don’t want you to know.
Means: nothing. The Fair Credit Reporting Act is a public statute and the dispute process is a free form on three websites. There is no hidden clause. If a method could only work while nobody knew about it, it does not work.
Don’t contact the bureaus yourself, you’ll mess up our work.
Means: they do not want you to see the responses, which are addressed to you and not to them. It is your file. You are entitled to every letter about it, and a firm that discourages you from reading your own mail is telling you something.
When we say no
About one person in four who calls us should not hire us.
There is no fee for finding that out, and we would rather say it in the first half hour than in the fourth month.
Your report is accurate and there is nothing to dispute
It happens often. In that case there is no repair work, only rebuilding, and the rebuilding is something we will show you how to do in one free session. Paying a monthly fee for someone to watch an accurate file age is not a service.
You are being sued, garnished or foreclosed on
You need a lawyer this week. Legal Aid of Cleveland handles consumer debt cases at no cost for people within their income guidelines, and the Ohio State Bar has a referral line. We will sit with you while you make the call if that helps.
The real problem is that the numbers do not add up
If your income cannot cover your obligations no matter how the file is reported, the honest conversation is about a non-profit credit counselling agency, or about whether a bankruptcy would give you a floor to stand on. Both are better than paying us.
You want a promise we are not allowed to make
If what you need to hear is a number and a date, we will not be able to give you one, and somebody down the road will. We would rather lose the client than be the reason you believed it.
Before you sign anything
Three things the law gives you, whoever you use.
No fee before the work is done
A credit repair organisation may not charge or accept payment until the services it promised have been fully performed. Not a deposit, not a setup fee, not a “file activation” charge, not a first month in advance. If anyone asks, that is your answer.
A written contract, before any work starts
It must say what will be done, how long it is expected to take, the total cost, and it must come with a separate written statement of your rights under state and federal law. You get a copy of everything you sign, and you get time to read it at home.
Three business days to cancel, no reason needed
You may cancel without penalty or obligation at any time before midnight of the third business day after signing. The cancellation form comes attached to the contract; you post it or hand it back, and that is the end of it. Nobody will call to talk you out of it.
If a credit repair company has taken money from you before performing the work, or promised a result, you can report it to the Federal Trade Commission at reportfraud.ftc.gov, to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at consumerfinance.gov, or to the Ohio Attorney General. You may also have a private right of action under the Credit Repair Organizations Act. That is worth knowing whether or not you ever speak to us.
Still here?
Then you already know what this is and what it is not, which puts you ahead of most people who walk in. The first conversation is free and half an hour long, and it ends with you knowing what is on your file — whether or not you ever pay us anything.
Not ready to talk to anyone? Take the guide and do it yourself. It is the same method, it costs nothing, and you never have to tell us you used it.