Credit Repair BEST Approved Companies

Click here to view our list of Credit Repair BEST Approved companies.
In order to help people find a credit repair company they can trust, we have created a series of guidelines credit repair companies must abide by to be considered Credit Repair BEST Approved. These guidelines are detailed below.

1. The credit repair company may not accept payment for any services until they have been rendered.

Why this is important: A classic credit repair scam is one in which an individual or organization claims to be able to clean up a person's credit report for a hefty upfront fee, often times many hundreds or even thousands of dollars. But after they get your money, their true nature shows through. They do little if anything to help clean up your credit and often times; once the heat is on they disappear or go out of business. They may later set up shop again under a different name or in a different location and the con is on again.

It is because of this that the federal Credit Repair Organizations Act (CROA) prohibits credit repair companies from accepting payment for services until after they have been rendered. At Credit Repair BEST, we appreciate the letter and the intent of this law. Except in cases where individual state CROA laws allow credit repair companies to accept payment in advance (usually also requiring the company to obtain surety bonds), Credit Repair BEST Approved companies do not charge their customers for credit repair services until after those services have been performed.

2. The credit repair company must set reasonable expectations.

Why this is important: Consumers need to realize that there are no guarantees when it comes to credit repair. Your credit reports are comprised of information reported by your creditors to the credit bureaus and they alone are the ones that have the ability to add and remove information from your credit reports. So while a credit repair company may have had a great success rate working with these entities in the past, there is no guarantee that their services will work for you. Even if an item on your credit report is absolutely, 100% incorrect, the credit bureaus will continue to list it on your credit reports if your creditor vouches for its accuracy. Even if you hire a lawyer and sue the creditor for incorrectly reporting information about you to the credit bureaus, forcing them to stop reporting the item requires that you win in court which any lawyer will tell you is not a sure thing.

Because of the nature of the credit reporting system, no credit repair company can guarantee to be able to clean up your credit. At best, they can offer you your money back if they are not able to help you realize certain goals.

Credit Repair BEST Approved companies properly set this expectation. While they may cite past statistics, they also will let you know that there is a chance that their services will be unable to remove negative information from your credit reports.

3. A credit repair company must inform you of your right to repair your credit yourself.

Why this is important: There is no great mystery to credit repair. There is no secret back door that only credit repair companies know about, and there is no insider knowledge a credit repair company has that you cannot access yourself. Anything a credit repair company can do for you, you can do for yourself.

This is important because people should realize that they have a choice. If you have questionable items on your credit reports, it is not a requirement that you have to pay a company to dispute these listings. You have the right to contact the credit bureaus and our creditors directly to dispute negative listings. In fact, credit repair companies will typically perform this work in your name in order to make it appear like you are the one initiating the disputes.

You should not feel pressured into signing up for a credit repair company because you believe it is the only way to repair your credit. Instead, if you sign up with a credit repair company, it should be because you would rather rely on their knowledge and experience than spend the time and energy required to repair your credit yourself.

A Credit Repair BEST Approved company will inform you of your right to order copies of your credit reports yourself and to dispute any inaccurate listings they contain.

4. A credit repair company must allow you at least 3 days to change your mind.

Why this is important: Having a bad credit score can be financially and emotionally taxing. The sense of desperation that can come from having a low credit score can push people to be impulsive and do things they later regret. Signing up for a credit repair service before having a complete understanding of that service or complete confidence in the company behind it may be one of those things.

Also because of the Credit Repair Organizations Act, credit repair companies are required to give you 3 days to cancel a credit repair service. Individual states may extend this time period even more.

Credit Repair BEST Approved companies will give you the option to cancel their service if you have buyer's remorse and if you do so within the 3 day window, you will not be responsible to pay anything.

5. A credit repair company must accept credit cards as a form of payment and process these payments themselves.

Why this is important: This guideline isn't anything that is required by any federal or state laws that we are aware of, but we feel it is an important for distinguishing legitimate credit repair companies from those who should be avoided for two reasons.

First, credit cards offer consumers a layer of protection. With cash, checks, or money orders, once a company has your money in hand, you have to trust them to fulfill their end of the bargain. If you learn after they already have your money that they have not honored their commitments, it is no easy task to get your money back. Especially in the case of cash transactions, if the company disappears, you will be hard pressed to even track them down let alone prove they owe you anything. On the other hand, if you pay using a credit card, you will have a better chance of having your hard earned money returned to your bank account.

Secondly, in order for a company to be able to process credit card transactions, and not just ue a third party payment system like Paypal, the company must put forth the effort to establish merchant accounts and jump through other hoops that place them "on the radar". This is not necessarily an easy process so it is a good sign a credit repair company plans to be in business for a while so there is less of a chance that they will disappear once they have your money. Also, it means they will have a credit card company looking over their shoulder making sure there are not too many charge backs or other signs of shady business practices.

6. A credit repair company that collects credit card or Social Security numbers on their website must only do so on encrypted pages.

Why this is important: When you send and receive information over the Internet, this data typically “hops” through a number of different servers and other devices on various networks enabling more people than just yourself and the website owner to see what is going back and forth. Generally this isn't a problem since this information usually consists of requests for a webpage (you click on a link) and the requested webpage being returned to you. But when you submit confidential personal information via a form on a website, the last thing you want is for others to be able to intercept this data. This is why we have “secured” web pages.

When you submit information using a form on a secured web page, this information is encrypted before it is sent. Encrypting the information can be thought of as turning it into a code that can only be interpreted by the server hosting the webpage. This code is essentially impossibly to decipher so anyone intercepting the information wouldn't be able to do anything with it.

Anytime you submit sensitive information online such as your credit card number, you should make sure the page is secure. You will be able to tell because the website address starts with https:// instead of a just http:// and there should be a padlock icon displayed by your browser.

Any company that requests sensitive personal information online such as their sign-up forms should make sure to secure these pages. Credit Repair BEST does not knowingly endorse any credit repair companies who, by not securing their sign-up pages, expose your personal information and put you at risk for identity theft.