JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Hundreds of VyStar Credit Union customers were left in financial limbo after a banking error negatively impacted their credit scores, including a local man who said the issue put his plans of buying a new home on hold.
VyStar told News4JAX on Thursday afternoon they’ve received confirmation from all four bureaus that impacted members’ credit scores have been updated to reflect the correction.
A local man News4JAX spoke with on Thursday checked his credit score and said his credit score dropped from the exceptional score of 896 to 710, and said his wife’s credit score plummeted from 895 to 715.
“I want it fixed immediately. I mean, I didn’t, I didn’t cause for this. My wife didn’t cause for this. We paid our bills on time. We paid you off completely, and then, for whatever reason, you decide you wanted to report us to the credit agencies that we’re in default on a mortgage that we do not have with your company. I want it resolved,” Clarence Evans, a VyStar Credit Union customer, said.
Evans said he received a letter from VyStar acknowledging the bank had reported he and his wife were delinquent on their mortgage, which he paid off two years ago.
The letter states, “We sincerely regret this and want to assure you that our team is working with the credit bureau to correct this as soon as possible. We will notify when the issue has been resolved, and there will be no impact to your credit score once corrected.”
Evans said he doesn’t want any more letters or emails, he wants action.
“I got another letter in the mail today apologizing again for VyStar’s mess up, and they’re going to get it fixed. But now it’s going to take up to 30 days. And from what I’ve talked to the credit agencies, it’s going to take extremely, a lot longer than that to get your credit scores back to where they need to be,” Evans said.
Evans said he and his wife considered buying a home, but now those plans are on the back burner.
“Every day that these customers from VyStar are living with lower credit scores, it’s literally costing them money. How much money is going to depend upon? Are you in the middle of getting a mortgage? This could either prevent them from refinancing or purchasing a home. It could delay the process. It could lead to higher interest rates, larger down payments. So there’s a whole host of damages, unfortunately, that these customers need to think about,” Paul Oster, a renowned credit repair expert and CEO of Better Qualified, said.
Oster expressed concern that customers may not fully recover their credit scores, despite VyStar’s attempts to correct the error.
“There are situations even with proof, where the credit bureaus, for whatever reason, refuse to remove this negative and derogatory information. We’ve seen it happen 1,000 times over the past 20 years,” Oster said. “What we’ve seen, unfortunately, if information gets placed on a consumer’s credit report erroneously, even if it after it’s removed, they don’t get all the points back that they had lost when that negative information hit. So they have to look at their credit report.”
Oster encouraged impact customers to go to annualcreditreport.com to verify that the information is still on the reports.
VyStar released the following statement at 3:11 p.m. on Thursday to News4JAX:
“VyStar has received confirmation from all four bureaus that impacted members’ credit scores have been updated to reflect the correction” adding “third parties take longer to report. ”
News4JAX followed up with Evans to see if he had seen a change in his credit score, but as of 4:14 p.m., he said it was still in the low 700s.