Woman Sues Equifax For Credit Errors and Wins $18.6M

By now you should know that your credit is used for everything from determining whether you can get a job to getting an apartment or buying a house. Major errors on your credit report can cause adverse actions in any of those instances.

Now, imagine that you keep getting denied for credit and you have no idea why. You finally check your credit report and find numerous errors with everything from your birth date to cards that you never had listed. You try and try for two years to get the errors corrected, but they still persisted. Finally, the credit bureau tells you that your credit file had become mixed with someone else, so, some was able to see all of your information including your Social Security number. Because of this error the credit bureau was having a difficult time separating the files.

What would you do?

This happened to an Oregon woman named Julie Miller. Not only did Julie get frustrated and angry, she sued Equifax and was awarded a judgement of $18.6M. According to her attorney Justin Baxter, “There was damage to her reputation, a breach of her privacy and the lost opportunity to seek credit.”  A major factor in the decision was the co-mingling of information from two different people who were then provided with personal information that was not their own.