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Call Kurtis: I Still Have My Appendix, Stop Billing Me For An Appendectomy!

FAIR OAKS (CBS13) -- Debt collectors don't always get it right. Just ask Rodney Carvalho of Fair Oaks.

Earlier this year, as Carvalho was attempting to arrange a mortgage, he discovered a debt collection agency had placed a notice of an outstanding debt on Carvalho's credit report. The agency claimed Carvalho owed $2800 to a doctor in Texas for an appendectomy – an operation, Carvalho swears, never took place.

"I still have my appendix," Carvahlo said. When Carvahlo called the debt collection company, RS Clark & Associates of Dallas, to ask them to remove the negative report, "they were unwilling to do it."

The negative report is known as a "trade line" in the credit industry. And it was enough to send Carvalho's credit score tumbling from a near perfect 813 to a not-bad 708.

Although it still isn't clear how Carvalho got in the cross-hairs of a debt collector, cases like his in which consumers are hounded for debts that are not theirs are considered identity theft, according to Jay Foley of the ID Theft Resource Center. "That's the best and safest way for us to handle it," Foley said.

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