Ms. Miller contacted Equifax eight times between 2009 and 2011 trying to rectify the mistakes. The jury awarded Ms. Miller $18.4million in punitive damages and $180,000 in compensatory damages.<\/p>\n
Mistakes included erroneous accounts and collection attempts, the wrong Social Security number and birthday, according to a copy of the lawsuit reviewed by MailOnline.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2018There was damage to her reputation, a breach of her privacy and the lost opportunity to seek credit,\u2019 said Portland attorney Justin Baxter. \u2018She has a brother who is disabled and who can’t get credit on his own, and she wasn’t able to help him.\u2019<\/p>\n
Ms. Miller claims in the suit that she discovered the mangled mess made of her credit report after being denied credit by a local bank in December 2009. She reached out to Equifax and complied with multiple requests for forms and additional information only to have her efforts repeatedly go nowhere. Additional efforts to obtain copies of her credit report also proved unsuccessful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The credit bureaux should be happy I wasn’t the judge.\u00a0 I’d have authorized their complete sell-off and liquidation, using the National Guard if necessary.\u00a0 Yep, I’ve fought with Equifax too.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The credit reporting industry has an absurd amount of power – and while I joke (and not in a “hah hah” kind of way) about using the Air Force to re-jigger the market, and acknowledge they serve a role in the free market, they do the job really, really badly.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 18 million dollar settlement will no doubt get shaved down to $5000 at appeal.\u00a0 But it’s a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Allow me to do an end-zone happy dance.\u00a0 It may be a brief one, but I’m gonna dance anyway. Julie Miller, a woman from Oregon, filed suit against Equifax after a two-year battle to get her credit report corrected.\u00a0 She won an $18 million settlement: Ms. Miller contacted Equifax eight times between 2009 and 2011 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37577"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37580,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37577\/revisions\/37580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}