How Credit Repair Millionaires Fight Stall Letters

Hey, credit heroes. Credit bureaus love sending out stall letters. It's one of their oldest tricks in the book to make you give up. But when you're on a mission to fix credit and change lives, you can't give up. That's why today I'm sharing these expert credit heroes top tips for fighting back against stall letters and getting results. So you better stick around. My name is Daniel Rosen, and welcome to Credit Repair Business secrets. In the 20 years since releasing my first credit repair software, I've helped thousands of businesses scale from the ground up. And I've experienced many of the same challenges that credit heroes face. And I learned proven ways to overcome them and succeed. A lot of things have changed in my 20 years in the industry, but some things stay the same. The credit bureaus want you to give up and go away because they make a lot more money. If you do, you've probably sent off a dispute letter expecting results. But instead, you get a stall. Stall letter. A bureaucratic roadblock meant to stop you in your tracks. Stall letters are not the end. They are just the beginning of the credit repair game. Here's a thing to remember. Stall tactics from the credit bureaus aren't new. The exact letters they're sending, they've changed over time. But the idea is the same. Whether you believe there are reasons for stalling and playing games are mean or that they're just being lazy. Their ultimate goal is to discourage you from repairing credit because that costs them money. Now, while stall tactics are very real, it's also important to make sure that you don't give them any leverage. Be sure that your disputes are accurate and that you're including all the necessary information and that your letters are clear. Don't give them any reason to doubt you. Here's why this is important. Stall letters can be scary to receive. They make it sound like you're doing something wrong, and they can be really confusing. So you gotta be prepared. Have a plan to deal with stall letters and communicate it to your clients ahead of time. Don't wait until a stall letter comes and everyone panics. Here's what you need to know. Stall letters are a hot topic in our credihero community, and I see questions about them all the time. So I asked some of our most successful credit heroes and other experts how they deal with stall letters. You might not see results right away with one thing, but keep trying until you find exactly what works for you. Here's their advice. Michael Franks runs a really successful credit repair business in Atlanta, and he sends a Powerful message to the credit bureaus right from the start.

It is very frustrating and especially with the star letters. I found a way now that I don't get style letters anymore. They have stopped and they send. One client got one the other day from Experian and I told her go to the courthouse. And we filed with cfpb, went to the courthouse and well, we'll hear from experience, hopefully within 14 days.

That's amazing. What's your secret? Just between you and me, what's your secret for not having stall letters?

I let them know up front that if you send me a stall letter, I'm going to sue you.

Oh wow.

That's the very first line in the letter. Every letter I send. Now if you send me a computer generated letter just like you, just like the letter that you had, the reply, the reply to credit accusation, I put that in the first letter.

Now that is amazing. So they take it seriously.

Yeah, especially when I pay for shipping, that that cuts my bottom line out. When you pay me your fee, that shipping comes out of my fee. So If I'm sending 100 stall response letters every week, $1.13 per letter, that's $113 a week, that's $500 a month. So I need my money.

Michael even posted a follow up to this in our Facebook community. He includes this exact wording in his letters. Please be advised that if you send me a computer generated letter stating that you have ceased investigation of my credit reports because in your opinion you believe I have used a third party credit repair age, you will be in blatant violation of the fcra. This stall tactic on your part to grant you an additional 30 days to comply with my original request will result in a lawsuit with your company. This is your only warning. Awesome advice, Michael. The next tactics come from Haseeb Hussain who is an amazing FCRA attorney who partners with credit repair companies. Let's start with stall letters. They're still a huge problem for people. And for anyone who doesn't know, stall letters are responses from the credit bureaus that stall or delay the credit repair process. So what can credit repair businesses do to avoid stall letters?

Well, my suggestion is always to a credit repair company dispute individually and dispute individual trade lines. Don't make your disputes very, very generic. Don't make them all look the same. When a credit bureau has a sense that a lot of letters are getting sent from a credit repair company and they have done their best in all these years to make the credit repair industry just very difficult to even Exist. So they got crowapass the telemarketer sales rule. Just all these laws coming into place that makes credit repair company job is very difficult. So the bureau's haven't necessarily been on our side. So they're looking for every reason to come back and say, wait a second, are you guys using a credit repair company? Because we don't sense that that dispute came from you. So the more a credit repair company individualizes disputes and they don't all look the same, the better chance you have of getting that specific item that you're requesting get reinvestigated. Reinvestigated. But on top of that, attaching Social Security cards, driver's license, giving them all the information that a stall letter usually just asks for at the end of it all can can point to the fact that. Wait a second, was my dispute actually even reviewed? Because if you had reviewed it, you would have noticed that all the things I'm attaching to that initial dispute is everything you're asking for in that stall letter. So if you do that at the outset, make your disputes very individual, not mass ending disputes, not disputing every single thing or on an actual credit report and disputing the things that are actually inaccurate, that's ups up for a better FCRA case and the less likelihood of getting a stall letter back. I don't necessarily see a stall letter as a bad thing. If my client has disputed a trade line that let's say is reporting the wrong balance. I sent a dispute. I sent a dispute with the address, client's information attached a driver's license, which, which I don't even really need to do, attach a Social Security card proving identity, attach everything I need, and on top of that attached an actual balance statement showing that what the actual balance should be on a, on a credit report. And they came back and hit me with a stall letter. Well, now I have proof that they got the dispute and that's great. I want them to say, hey, we received your dispute. We just don't think it was sent by you. Why don't you think it was sent by me? I hatch everything that you're already asking for in the stall letter. I necessarily wouldn't even advise my client to respond to the stall letter with things they're asking for. They already had their chance to reinvestigate and I treat that stall letter in litigation as a response, as a dispute response. I disputed and they responded. It's too bad that the response is asking me for stuff I already provided them. So I use that to Say you guys got the dispute, you didn't reinvestigate, the account's still there. My client's applying for credit, they're getting denied. And now I have an FCRA case. So a lot of the times when stall letters come back, I don't necessarily do nothing with them. And we don't tell credit repair companies to continue disputing if the dispute itself was sufficient initially and we don't have to add anything else to it. And their SAL letter comes back and says, provide all this other stuff, I'll bring it as an FCRA case.

Awesome. I want to touch on one thing you said because I think it's really important. A lot of people go in and they want to dispute every single thing that's negative on the report all at once. They're in a hurry.

I would not suggest that as a good tactic if you were trying to get something that is actually inaccurate. I'm talking something that's factually wrong. An account that doesn't exist, it was paid off, it's still reporting a balance. There's stuff that are post bankruptcy reporting, there's balances left that should have been eliminated. So if you dispute everything, the stuff that are that is actually inaccurate has a less likelihood of being reviewed. It has a less likelihood of being reinvestigated because they might just come back as a salad and might not even look at it. I think that triggers a stall letter more than anything is when everything gets wound up in a dispute and they think it starts coming from a credit repair company. There's nothing illegal about a credit repair company disputing on behalf of a consumer. That's totally fine. The bureau's want to make it seem like sometimes they want to make it seem like it's not okay. It needs to come from the actual consumer. And we sometimes get into the whole power of attorney whatnot. And some I know credit repair companies get in the business of making themselves a power of attorney to be able to, it's not even necessary, it's okay for a credit repair company to help a consumer dispute. There's nothing illegal about that. I know Crow, the CEO of Credit Repair Organizations act has, has rules that need to be followed. But it's say that you can't help a client dispute. So when they come back and say they don't think the dispute came from the client and everything is attached saying that the client actually helped provide this information, then there's a better chance of it getting reinvestigated. And a failed reinvestigation leads to a case. And then that's where you get an attorney involved. Not necessarily the fact that something gets disputed and a stall letter gets sent. It's not end all, be all. There's still stuff that can be done. You don't need to send another dispute letter. Sometimes that in itself can act like a verification that they received the dispute.

Wow, that's a lot of great nuggets right there. Now, the brothers behind Goat's credit, Rami and Ehab Mahmoud, had some really great advice for setting expectations with your clients about stall letters. Here's what they had to say.

You get those all the time. You know, those are, those are a nutcase. Those are a nutshell. We've had people who've gotten those stall tactic letters for months on months. I had somebody who got it maybe between four to six months, they were just getting these stall tactic letters. And you know, at one point I was like, oh my God, like we're doing everything in the book. But the seventh month, his credit shot up like, I don't know, 150 points, 200 points. He got like 56 deletions.

Wow.

So the name of the game is to keep pushing and to switch up your strategies. You know, when I first started doing this, you know, quite frankly, I didn't really, I wasn't. I didn't know how to dispute effectively and accurately. You know, I was actually doing trial and error with maybe my own credit or one or two people that I knew. I was like, let me try this dispute. Let me try this. And then after a while, like maybe two, three months, I realized what was working and what wasn't. And putting not mine every time is not going to work. That doesn't work. So you might work once in a blue. But I realized that things was really understanding the fair credit, reporting, acting law, understanding how the bureau's work, understanding how they're the messenger. They're the ones that are challenging. They have to verify. And then if you're dealing with that, if we have to reach out to the creditor, you know, it all depends on how things were. If I feel account wasn't going somewhere and they already verified, maybe I'll tell the client, listen, this is not getting removed. You already know. They already know who you are. You might have to settle and then we can get it removed. You know, so there's every, every client's report is different. We learned how to do bankruptcies. You know, you're not dealing directly with the bureaus. That's a court matter. The court, the bureau Tells you that the court's posting that up. And, you know, when you go to the court, they're like, I didn't send that into Experian. You go through different strategies, different ways. All I can tell you is that it's a learning matter throughout the months, and we're still learning. But when we do have something that doesn't happen in a guaranteed result time, you know, we tell our clients, listen, we, you know, we've started to guarantee the work that we can do because we know what, we know how to do it, you know, and if we have somebody that, you know, we failed in a time which rarely really ever happens, but if we did have somebody upset or we didn't get them done in time, we simply tell them that we've never failed anybody. We've never gotten anyone done like this. Give us this extra month or two lead way, and we will make sure that, you know, these results come in. And surely they do.

That's all it takes. And now to answer your question from a client standpoint, what do we do with those stall tactic letters? Oh, I'm getting these letters from the cr. Oh, it's not working. We get in front of that.

We don't.

We let them anticipate those letters.

Tell them we're getting it on the close.

Guys, you're gonna get basically, you know, I tell them, hey, just a couple expectations. You're gonna get updates every 30, 45 days from one of our associates, all right? You're gonna get a letter from the credit bureaus. You might get an email from Experian as well letting you know that, hey, it looks like there's a third party working on your credit. We're not doing it. Guys, guys, it's part of procedure, all right? Don't worry about it. Pay no mind to it. It's a stall tactic letters, right? They just need to buy themselves more time. They send it to all our clients, rest assured, you're good.

And we post it on our Instagram. We have a picture of it on our Instagram of the letters, experian and the TransUnion, what they look like. So if you get them, you already know what they look like.

So we get in front of it.

Wow, that's a lot of great ideas there. And the final tip actually comes from you? Well, kinda. It comes from your questions and reports that the credit bureaus are rejecting letters that they think are templates. So my team and I worked really hard to find a way to help you to fight back against this unfair practice. So we created letters by AI. Our unique AI generated letters reduce the risk of credit bureaus flagging your disputes as templates because now every single letter is unique, which means less rejections and faster results for your clients and a better success rate. When you create a dispute letter in your Credit Repair Cloud Letter wizard, just select Generate AI Letter and a unique letter will be generated. It's super easy and super fast. And if you want to change any text or add in any specific information, you can do that right in the Letter wizard too. If you don't already have a Credit Repair Cloud account, now's a great time to take advantage of our 30 day free trial. Come see why most credit repair businesses in America run on Credit Repair Cloud. Sign up for free at signup.creditrepaircloud.com here's my final point. Just remember, stall tactics are designed to discourage you. The credit bureaus want you to walk away and give up. They do. But the work you do matters, so you can't give up. So stay sharp and try these expert strategies until you get the results you need. And I'll end by saying, if you want to learn expert tactics, check out Consumer Law Credit Repair Explained. And if you'd like to improve your credit score and discover how to earn extra income repairing Credit for others, check out my brand new Start Repairing Credit Challenge. Sign up right now@startrepairingcredit.com and keep changing lives.