A question was posed to me recently as I start to re-brand my credit repair website. Can someone use LinkedIn for credit repair to locate contacts?
The very profound answer to this is YES! Using LinkedIn for credit repair is a very valuable tool, in the right situation of course. I have noticed a few issues when using LinkedIn for credit repair and those mainly stem from the lack of anonymity. It is difficult to be stealthy about your approach when the collection company can tell you have instantly viewed their profile and they might assume you are about to make a move. This could awaken a bad debt earlier than you anticipated. Ideally, you would like to view these contacts while NOT logged in, but keep in mind, many companies will not allow their contacts to be shown unless you are logged into a profile. If you must be logged in to a profile, I would encourage creating a profile solely for this purpose, and keep you personal information as private as possible.
Very early on in my credit repair process, I struggled to find contacts to specific companies. I managed to get a hold of someone at a collection company with LinkedIn, but it didn’t yield any real response. It should be mentioned, however, that this occurred in 2012 and LinkedIn has grown substantially in recent years. I recently advised a colleague of mine to try using LinkedIn for credit repair contact generating, and he was able to successfully remove two late payments with Santander, a financial lending company.
LinkedIn for Credit Repair Checklist:
- Try not to use your real information as this could jump start collection on a zombie debt.
- Reach out via the LinkedIn message portal.
- If locate names but not contacts, use Google to find out the naming convention that company uses and ‘guess’ key people.
- Use these contacts the same as you would a Good Will letter.
