There is an industry that, even though it is regulated by federal legislation and has been helping consumers for decades, is among the most denigrated in the country. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have benefited from the services offered by the companies and individuals who comprise the industry, there are still people who are adamant that the entire industry is a scam and anyone who is a part of it is a con-artist.

After reading the main heading of this article, it's pretty obvious that the industry we are referring to is the credit repair industry. Despite the fact that the oldest credit repair companies have been around for 20 years, that credit repair services have helped people remove millions of negative items from their credit reports, and that Congress created the Credit Repair Organizations Act (CROA) in order to regulate credit repair companies and not to wipe them out, there are "experts" in the media, in major corporations, and in government positions who claim that any company who offers credit repair services is trying to take advantage of you.

There are logical reasons why people think credit repair is a scam. To start with, there have been many "credit repair" clinics that truly were out to dupe people. These clinics promised the world but ended up just taking people's money or in some cases getting them involved in credit repair schemes that were illegal. Left and right people were falling for these con artists to the point that the media and legal attention paid to these clinics was large enough to put a cloud over the entire industry. Instead of spending the time to distinguish the good services from the bad, many people decided that the credit repair industry as a whole was fraudulent.

And making this conclusion was pretty easy because there are massive institutions that want people to believe that credit repair companies are not to be trusted. And who are these institutions? They are the credit reporting agencies (credit bureaus) who maintain your credit report and the lenders who make use of your credit scores. The credit bureaus do not want people to work to repair their credit report. It is bad for business. The credit bureaus make money by collecting information about you, assembling it in a report, and selling it. Credit repair causes them to have to do additional work that costs them money. When you are managing hundreds of millions of credit reports, that cost would be extremely high if everyone out there started working to repair their credit. On the other hand, many lenders such as credit card companies don't want you to clean up your credit because if you increase your credit score, they won't be able to charge you as high of interest rates. So, given the size of the entities that would prefer you didn't repair your credit and the fact that their profits would be affected, it is little wonder that when people look to justify their concerns about credit repair companies, they are able to find plenty of information. Also factor in the huge budgets these organizations can allocate for lobbying lawmakers and seeding stories in media outlets and there is little wonder why the proliferation of anti-credit repair information dwarfs the voice of the pro-credit repair crowd.

When looking at all these factors it is easy to see why people believe there is no such thing as a legitimate credit repair service and why it is so difficult to persuade them otherwise.

Perhaps someday the situation will change. As more and more people are able to successfully increase their credit score with help from credit repair companies there are more people who know credit repair works to counter the people who believe it does not. But until there are enough success stories to turn the tide, the people who do their research, find a reputable credit repair company, and work to clean up their credit will be the lucky ones because their credit scores will look that much better than those of the people who will do nothing.