Straight out of college, I went to work in New York, staying in Room 512 of Loews Summit Hotel on Lexington Avenue at the government rate of $62 a night plus tax. I had a few dollars and a virgin American Express card in my wallet when I arrived, and when I checked out 114 days later, I put the whole bill, nearly $10,000, on American Express — a single charge that established me as a golden credit risk. Later, when I moved here to start a business, I used credit cards to pay for merchandise, paying big charges and racking up new cards, 14 of them, with a combined limit exceeding $250,000. As the business established its own credit, I began to thin my credit cards and kept five, rotating them in my wallet, always paying the bill on time — easy to do because nothing I bought was ever very expensive. Three of the five ultimately became Citi cards as Citi acquired other credit-card companies. My combined credit totaled $67,000 with Citi, which seemed not to notice or care, as they continued to send me separate statements for each card, and three of every bulk mailed offers for more. I got my last bulk mailing in February of 2007, form letters closing each account “based on information obtained from a consumer reporting agency.”

I was an identity theft victim.

In January, state legislators and regulators will spend most of their time and most of our money “fixing” education. The state could, if it chose, do all of us a lot of good without spending a dime, and put an end to identity theft. Right now, under state law, the three consumer reporting agencies — Experian, Equifax and Transunion — will only tell you what they have in their files on you if you pay them.

Don’t be misled: The free credit report ads you see on television are bait-and-switch. You can receive a free copy of your credit report only if “negative information” is added. How do you know if negative information has been added? The three reporting agencies must tell you, by state law, within 12 months — a year later! In my case, a bank where I’d never applied for credit had reported me as delinquent on a loan I never applied for to buy a car I’d never driven in a state where I’d never lived. Citi, which checks credit reports regularly, saw the negative information in my file before I knew it was there and canceled all three cards. Citi wouldn’t tell me what the negative information was, and to find out, by state law, I had to contact all three reporting agencies separately.

A quick tip: Don’t try to request your credit report online. Send a letter. My credit reports, each 14 pages long, had the same credit account information from the banks, credit-card companies and retail stores, though the personal information varied wildly. In one, I’d been married, in another I had aliases — “Marc Carlisle aka Mac Carlile aka Mark Males” — but all three had the same single negative entry. By law, the reporting agencies are not required to verify the information they sell, for example, to Citi. They can wreck my credit without evidence, and the burden was on me to prove that I never co-signed for a car loan taken out by James (I kid you not) Bond, in Columbia, Tenn., an impossible task since the original loan application documents were never made available to me.

By law, I was a deadbeat. With the bogus car loan in my file, a file made available to any credit card company, bank, even the cable company, my only alternative to minimize the damage to my credit was to claim identity theft. Even then, the bogus loan stays in my file, although the credit agencies have added a “fraud alert” to my file, which makes it harder for me to apply for credit since I have to prove I’m really me applying for credit in my name and not the bogus Carlisle who let James Bond get away with a car in Tennessee.

In January, Colorado could end most identity theft by requiring the credit reporting agencies to notify consumers within 24 hours of negative information. Colorado could also make the consumer innocent until proven guilty, and require the credit reporting companies to verify the accuracy of the information in their files — files they sell profitably to a lot of people at my expense. The legislators can’t fix an education system they helped mold, but they can save tens of thousands of taxpayers a lot of trouble without spending a dime of our money.



Marc Carlisle writes a Thursday column. He can be reached at summitindie@yahoo.com.