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Woman wins suit against Equifax

Posted on Jul 25, 2006 by Tom Fragala

A victim of identity theft recently won a significant award against one CRA and continue her pursuit of justice. Her credit score and in tatters she went after the credit bureaus because after proving herself a victim of ID theft they allegedly did not comply with federal laws. Potomac News reports:

A federal jury has ordered Equifax Information Services LLC to pay a Nokesville woman $351,000 in actual damages from an identity theft lawsuit.

The $45 million lawsuit against three major credit reporting companies, Equifax, TransUnion and Experian Information Solutions and creditor CitiFinancial Inc. was the second in Suzanne Sloane's battle to reclaim her stolen identity.

When the Sloanes discovered that they had been the victims of identity theft, they reported the crimes to the credit reporting companies. Their lawsuit says the three companies continued to show debts incurred by the identity thief on the Sloanes' credit report.

The federal lawsuit against the credit reporting companies also sought about $13 million from CitiFinancial.The suit says CitiFinancial passed one of the accounts Shovana Sloan had opened to debt collection agencies, which then harassed the Sloane family for money that Shovana Sloan had spent.

So after a scan of this article, I am guessing that the CRA’s were alleged to have violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act (if you prove you’re a victim, they have to remove the fraudulent data from your file) and CitiFinancial the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (if you prove that debt was incurred fraudulently, they can’t continue to sell your debt out to collectors). Anyone with more knowledge of this case care to comment?