Originally Posted by
deejeff442
http:///forum/post/3281485
at&t huh.funny i just bought our credit reports monday just to see whats on there and my wife has a collection for $34 on it.as far as we remember we never had at&t for anything.what could even be $34 .maybe home phone but still too cheap.who the hell goes to collections for only $34?now we have to figure out how to get it off of there.
Have you ever had service with AT&T? This sounds exactly like a bill I had from them about 7 years ago. I had cell service with them, and when my contract expired, I canceled my service and went to Verizon. I called and spoke to a rep THREE times to insure they were charging my bank account for my last bill, and they told me "Yes". Same as you, I ran a credit report about a couple years later, and I see this "Credit WriteOff" for $47 from AT&T. I called them and ask what the charge was for. They said, "You didn't pay your final monthly bill for your cell service". I told them how I contacted their billing office to insure I was paid up, and they said, "We can't do electronic billing on the last payment. We have to send you a hard-copy in the mail, and you have to either mail in the payment, or go to an AT&T store and pay it there." Apparently, their 'hard copy' mailer looked exactly like the envelopes for their stupid promotional material, so I never opened it up. I asked them how I could resolve the hit on my credit, and they said, "We've already written the $47 off of our books since the charge is over a year old. You can't pay it, and there's nothing more we can do." So essentially the 'credit hit' was stuck on my report with nothing I could do about it. When I refinanced my house a year later, all I did was explained what the charge was for, and the bank pretty much said, "OK. As long as there's a viable excuse and answer, we'll ignore it." Whether a bank would do that today....
