If you have a credit monitoring service, you will likely get notifications to changes on your credit report. If it’s a tradeline update that you were not expecting, you may wonder why was this tradline updated out of the blue like this. You’re not alone. Let’s see why.
Applied for a new loan recently?
That may be it, but if you haven’t recently applied for any new loans, then you may wish to log in and see what the account is and make sure that it does belong to you. If it does not, act quickly to file a fraud alert, freeze your file, and dispute the tradeline with the reporting bureau.
However, more often than not, it just means that an installment or revolving tradeline balance and or account status got updated by the bank with new information.
What if a closed credit card updates a tradeline?
You may have had a credit card with the reporting bank, but it was closed years ago with no recent transactions.
So why is there a random updated balance and for what reason could they have to update a closed tradeline?
Natural Disasters-
Even if you were not directly impacted by a natural disaster, if you were in the area, a creditor may issue an alert to the credit bureaus, due to the impact it may have on getting your bills out on time.
One man reports that this happened even though the flood occurred on the other side of the state, yet "Affected By Natural Disaster” was updated on an old tradeline.
Another likely cause-
Was your Credit Report Frozen?
A source at Trusted ID states that, if you change your credit file status to frozen, lenders may not be able to make updates without communicating with you and getting access again.
What this means is, the reported balance that was showing before the updated tradeline would have been from the previous statement, which can differ from the “current” tradeline balance itself- so it gets updated.
So, if the tradeline reports a zero balance and that the account is Closed, you are more than likely just fine, and there’s nothing to worry about.
