How every page on this site is sourced, checked and corrected

1. What this site is

DisputeDesk publishes reference material about disputing errors on a US credit report, plus software you run yourself to write and track those disputes. It is free to read, free to use up to a limit, and independent.

It is also finance-adjacent content in the strict sense: the person reading a page here is trying to protect their money or their legal rights. That is the category where a confident wrong sentence costs someone real money, so it gets the strictest writing rules we know how to write.

2. What this site is not

• Not a law firm. Nothing here is legal advice, and nobody here can advise you on your situation.
• Not a credit repair company. We do not remove items, we do not sell credit repair, and we do not monitor files for new negative information. Payment processors classify exactly this kind of product strictly, and framing it honestly is what lets the site exist at all.
• Not a debt collection agency, a debt settlement company or a credit counsellor.
• Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the CFPB, Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, any collection agency, creditor, hospital, health insurer or state attorney general named on any page here.
• Not a publisher of outcomes. We publish law, addresses and process. We do not publish predictions.

3. Where a page’s claims come from

Four kinds of source are used, and nothing else counts:

1. Statutory text, read in a primary source. The US Code as published at law.cornell.edu, the Federal Register, and the Code of Federal Regulations for Regulation F. We do not quote a statute from a blog that quotes it from a blog.
2. Court records and docket documents for anything about litigation, and the agency’s own rule page for the status of a rule.
3. The organisation’s own published page for anything factual about that organisation — a bureau’s dispute address, a lender’s or fintech’s credit-reporting policy, a state attorney general’s intake route. Their page beats our paraphrase of their page.
4. Official statistics, when we use them at all. Where a number came from a secondary report we could not open, we do not print it.

4. The VERIFY marker: how a claim gets marked as unconfirmed

Anything a researcher could not fully confirm carries a marker in the page source, written as an HTML comment in the form <!-- VERIFY: … -->. Because it is a comment, you will not see it rendered — so it is only useful if we tell you it is there, which is what this paragraph is for. If you open any page on this site and press Ctrl+U (or View Page Source), you can find those markers yourself.

The rules around them:

• A marker stays until a second, independent check confirms the claim. One pass is not confirmation.
• While a marker is live, the claim is either not asserted at all or asserted with the uncertainty printed where the reader will see it — as “not verified”, or as a visible line explaining how it was checked.
• Markers are never deleted to tidy the source. When a claim is confirmed, the marker is replaced with a note saying how it was confirmed and on what date.
• Where the uncertainty matters to you, it is promoted out of the source and into the page text. The TransUnion address page is the standard case: the live page refused automated access, so the archived-capture method is printed in a visible line above the address rather than hidden in a comment.

You can see markers at work on the Klarna, Afterpay, Affirm, charge-off and dispute letter template pages. None of them fills in a cell it could not source.

5. Addresses: the rule, and the one exception we had to take

The rule: a postal address is printed only if it appears on the organisation’s own current page. Bureau dispute addresses are checked against Equifax’s, Experian’s and TransUnion’s own dispute pages, and printed as inline text — never behind a form, never as an image, never as a PDF you have to enter an email address to open.

The exception: if the live page refuses automated access, we use an archived capture of that page, date-stamp the capture, and tell the reader that is what happened. TransUnion is the case in point. Its page returned an automated-request block, so its address — TransUnion Consumer Solutions, P.O. Box 2000, Chester, PA 19016-2000 — was confirmed from archived captures of TransUnion’s own dispute page dated 13 January 2026 and 19 February 2026, and the page carries a visible “last verified” line saying exactly that, with an instruction to confirm on transunion.com before mailing.

What we do not publish: per-state Equifax dispute addresses. Three canonical pages were opened and no official per-state table exists. A fifty-state table assembled from blogs would look authoritative and be unverifiable, so we tell readers Equifax publishes none and the national address is the correct destination.

6. What we refuse to publish

This list is short, specific, and enforced:

• “Charge-offs fall off after four years.” 15 U.S.C. §1681c(a)(4) says seven years, with the clock starting 180 days after the first delinquency under §1681c(c)(1). The four-year version is repeated everywhere and is in no law. The charge-off page says so and cites the section.
• Any statutory claim we cannot pin to a section. If we cannot give you a subsection, we do not make the claim. “Under federal law” is not a citation.
• A specific bureau or date for a fintech’s reporting unless that company says it. Where it does not, the cell reads not verified.
• A fifty-state table of anything assembled without an official source behind each row.
• “Overturned” for the 2025 medical-debt rule. It was vacated before it took effect, in Cornerstone Credit Union League v. CFPB (E.D. Tex., 11 July 2025). The two words mean different things and the medical debt page uses the right one.
• Stock photography, and any image of a person. There is no headshot, no photo of an office, no decorative illustration on the reference pages. A fabricated face behind a statutory claim is deception.
• Advertising for credit-repair or debt-settlement services. It is the obvious way to monetise this traffic and we decided against it. Money comes from readers buying a template once — see how this site makes money.

7. No page promises an outcome

This is a publishing rule, not a disclaimer we added at the bottom. A page that says or implies that an item will be removed fails review and does not go live. We do not write “we remove”, “we fix”, “get rid of” or “we will clear”, because we do none of those things — you do, under your own rights.

The reason is structural, not squeamishness. Under 15 U.S.C. §1681i(a)(1)(A) a dispute is free and the bureau has 30 days to investigate, with up to 15 more if it explains why; under 15 U.S.C. §1692g(a) a collector must validate a debt within five days; and under 15 U.S.C. §1692g(c) disputing is not an admission that you owe it. Those rights are real, they are yours, and they are exercised by you. What no one can hand you is a prediction of how they end, so we do not write one.

8. Corrections

• Errors get corrected on the page, not quietly deleted. The correction is logged in the changelog below with its date.
• Pages that go stale get re-checked, not abandoned. Every page prints the date its sources were checked. An old date is an honest signal to distrust it.
• Known problems are published, including our own. If two pages on this site contradict each other, we say so here rather than hoping nobody compares them. There is one open item today and it is in the changelog.
• A claim we cannot source comes down until we can source it. We would rather lose a page than keep an unsupported sentence.

We do not publish an email address we do not read. Every page links the source it came from, so the fastest correction is to open that source and see whether we got it wrong — and if we did, use the same contact route you would use for anything else on this site.

9. Who signs the work

Every page carries an organisational byline pointing to the byline page, which states the review standard and is explicit that no individual reviewer is named, because none has been retained whose credentials we could verify. We would rather show you a standard you can audit than a portrait we cannot substantiate. An organisational byline is a weaker signal of expertise than a named professional, and we say so on that page too.

10. Changelog

What changed, when, and why. Newest first.

Questions about how we work

Also worth reading: what DisputeDesk is and who pays us · who reviews this content · terms and disclosures · the guides.