I had a credit card charged off a couple of years ago and it is now on my credit report in three places, once with the original creditor and twice with different collectors. Can credit repair help?
Charged off accounts can generate more credit reporting errors requiring credit repair than any other type of negative event. And the combination of these errors can do more to depress your credit score than the original charge off itself. These errors can be fixed with credit repair. Ignore them and they will continue to hurt your credit, most likely for years to come.
The Charge Off Routine
When an account is charged off, usually six months after you defaulted on the obligation, the status is changed on your credit report from past due to charged off. In most cases these accounts are then turned over to a professional collector. The charge off status allows the creditor to write off the debt on their taxes, while the collector can continue the process of dunning you for the full amount plus any contractual late fees and penalties. And, as you have noticed, once they contact you they can report the collection to the credit bureaus. If the collector does not succeed they will often re-sell the debt to another collector, who will then attempt to collect, etc.
Compliance Errors and Credit Repair
All of this activity leads to the almost inevitable reporting errors that create the need for credit repair. Here are the most common compliance issues. After an account is charged off and turned over to a collector the original creditor is supposed to remove the past due amount from your report and show a zero balance. In theory your credit should only be showing the debt one time, and if the collector and the original creditor are both reporting the balance you are being hit twice. This leads to the next most common issue requiring credit repair. As your debt should not be simultaneously reported by the creditor and a collector, so also there should only be a single collector reporting the issue at a time. In your case there are two collectors reporting the same debt. This must also be corrected with credit repair.