Question about Date of First Delinquency (for Transunion/Equifax)
Hello all,
I opened a Koodo tab in June 2014. This was a particularly rough time for me, as I was an unemployed 19 year old living in and out of shelters due to family problems. I foolishly opened this line with Koodo with no reliable source of income, and I quickly racked up data overage charges. I only ever made one payment, and I stopped after I got hit with a $791.63 bill. Koodo eventually cut off my service, and eventually I forgot about this account after a few weeks.
Fast forward to ~summer 2017.... I was going through some of my old email addresses to use for gaming purposes, and I noticed that Koodo had still been sending me an online bill to the email address I provided to them. It was a regular bill with the account number, total due, and due date. The total had grown to $998.46, but it still seemed like "business as usual" to Koodo. They had been routinely sending a bill every month for the last 3 years, despite me not making a payment since July 2014. I was in college at this time and couldn't afford to pay this amount. I looked at my credit report to see what damage it had done, but was surprised to see that Koodo didn't appear anywhere on my file, even after 3 years of nonpayment. I was relieved but I wanted to make sure that I couldn't be sued, so I did some research. According the Ontario law, this "debt" was well past the statute of limitations, and being a 3 year old debt was about halfway to being removed from my credit report anyways. So I decided to leave it alone to not risk resetting any dates regarding the debt.
Which bring us to today. I remembered about the Koodo debt recently and realized that in a few months, I should expect for it to fall off and hopefully give my credit score a small boost. I pulled up my credit report from my bank, and I was shocked to see that the Koodo debt is now showing up as a collection account under "Metcredit", and it was opened on May 11, 2019. I had not received any letters or calls from Metcredit, but I took a look at the email address that had been getting the Koodo bill. Surely enough, the last bill (still at $998.46) was sent on March 19, 2019, and I guess it was finally sent to collections not long after that.
I'm not sure why it took Koodo almost 5 years to sell my debt off to collections, but I am worried that this new date (May 11, 2019) might have reset the original date of first delinquency. This could be the difference between having this item fall off my file in August/September and having to wait all over again until 2025!
IF I were to dispute this debt later this year, will the credit bureaus use the first missed payment (which would have been August 12, 2014) as the beginning of the 6 year reporting limit, or will they use the date my debt was sent to collections (May 11, 2019)?
Thank you for any help provided.
I opened a Koodo tab in June 2014. This was a particularly rough time for me, as I was an unemployed 19 year old living in and out of shelters due to family problems. I foolishly opened this line with Koodo with no reliable source of income, and I quickly racked up data overage charges. I only ever made one payment, and I stopped after I got hit with a $791.63 bill. Koodo eventually cut off my service, and eventually I forgot about this account after a few weeks.
Fast forward to ~summer 2017.... I was going through some of my old email addresses to use for gaming purposes, and I noticed that Koodo had still been sending me an online bill to the email address I provided to them. It was a regular bill with the account number, total due, and due date. The total had grown to $998.46, but it still seemed like "business as usual" to Koodo. They had been routinely sending a bill every month for the last 3 years, despite me not making a payment since July 2014. I was in college at this time and couldn't afford to pay this amount. I looked at my credit report to see what damage it had done, but was surprised to see that Koodo didn't appear anywhere on my file, even after 3 years of nonpayment. I was relieved but I wanted to make sure that I couldn't be sued, so I did some research. According the Ontario law, this "debt" was well past the statute of limitations, and being a 3 year old debt was about halfway to being removed from my credit report anyways. So I decided to leave it alone to not risk resetting any dates regarding the debt.
Which bring us to today. I remembered about the Koodo debt recently and realized that in a few months, I should expect for it to fall off and hopefully give my credit score a small boost. I pulled up my credit report from my bank, and I was shocked to see that the Koodo debt is now showing up as a collection account under "Metcredit", and it was opened on May 11, 2019. I had not received any letters or calls from Metcredit, but I took a look at the email address that had been getting the Koodo bill. Surely enough, the last bill (still at $998.46) was sent on March 19, 2019, and I guess it was finally sent to collections not long after that.
I'm not sure why it took Koodo almost 5 years to sell my debt off to collections, but I am worried that this new date (May 11, 2019) might have reset the original date of first delinquency. This could be the difference between having this item fall off my file in August/September and having to wait all over again until 2025!
IF I were to dispute this debt later this year, will the credit bureaus use the first missed payment (which would have been August 12, 2014) as the beginning of the 6 year reporting limit, or will they use the date my debt was sent to collections (May 11, 2019)?
Thank you for any help provided.
