patio11’s prior writing on this topic helped give me the knowledge and fortitude to successfully dispute several thousand dollars of fraudulent claims that Enterprise rental cars tried to collect from me. As he alluded to, my high-FICO self felt morally bound to settle and pay for the dented bumper, but they definitely violated the FDCPA and some CFPB rules (in writing!), which I enumerated for them. Maybe if I went “all the way” I could have paid $0 and gotten on the litigious debtor scrub list, but I worried that could somehow have been held against me in the future.
Yeah, that line stood out to me... I don't know how many of those high FICO score people pay because of morality verse how many pay because they want to continue to have access to lower cost debt that having a high FICO score gets you.
Well, challenging the debt on legal grounds shouldn't negatively impact your FICO score.
Presumably also if enough people broke this system, debt collection would be forced to change in a way that made it harder for people to do this. It is perhaps better if people who can manage to pay it do, so people who can't retain the ability to exploit the bad recordkeeping in the system as it is today?
Eventually your challenge (assuming you win) will have any negatives removed from your FICO score, but it may remain for a time while the challenge is in process and during that time you don't have the high score. Worse the lower score may mean other changes to your behavior that affect your credit indirectly - if you don't take out a loan you would have for example.
