Interview with the Guy Who Tried to Frame Me for Heroin Possession

This is not true. And the system works fine. But you'll have to do some work (write a few letters and maybe a bit more). Here's how:

0. Open a chronological paper file. Copies of all correspondence with dates clearly marked/stamped will go into this file. Put the file into a file cabinet: put a copy of every letter, note or form, including the creditors' initial complaint, into it in time order. Also put notes about any phone conversations into it. Put dates on everything.

1. Talk to your local police department and, with your son, file a report with them if possible. They'll view it as a waste of time but it helps by putting you on "the right side of the law." Do it just to have a police report on file locally.

2. Have your son write a letter to the creditor (not the credit bureau) explaining that your son is a minor, the debt is not his, he did not purchase the item and asking them to remove the invalid entry from his credit report. Add a page with your adult names and signatures explaining that he is your legal son. Send those two letters along with a copy of the chronological file to the the creditor, all via registered mail if you're paranoid.

3. Wait. They _will_ respond. Usually they'll cave at this point. Sometimes they'll call and ask that a police report be filed in _their_ jurisdiction (usually by phone) or some such. Do what they ask within reason. Make sure they (creditor, police) send you copies of everything. Follow up if they don't.

4. Wait. _They_ (the creditors, NOT you) should, after brief investigation, notify the credit bureau to remove the item from your son's credit report. If they don't do so within a few months, send follow-up second and third letters if necessary, reminding them.

5. If you get no response from the creditor after two months, copy the chronological file and send it via registered mail to the credit bureau adding a cover letter explaining that you have exhausted the legal means of redress with the creditors and they have refused to respond appropriately. Ask the credit bureau to investigate the creditor's item on your son's credit report.

This sounds like a lot of trouble but it really isn't and it would be a great lesson for you son, since it shows how most of the world works.

Correction involves loosely-coupled organizations and persons. Nothing in this happens at Internet speed. Each contact must have the situation explained from the beginning. It teaches a person how to order events in time, how to narrate a story consistently and how to be patient.

How do you do this? (Specifically, with the companies you mentioned.)

One possibility on the "cautionary lessons for the rest of us" front is a classic bit of wisdom about asymmetric adversarial situations: the other party only needs to get lucky once. There is a fundamental challenge of scale and time for any entity or individual that tries to run something dealing with persistent antagonists over long time periods, it just plain becomes hard to keep track of it all without further infrastructure systems in place. And its also hard for any single human to stay in the zone persistently, we're not really wired that way, hence the need for non-human support structures.

And that in turn is the same challenge for any business dealing with significant organic growth, criminal or not, it's the classic "that TOTALLY TEMPORARY one-off excel spreadsheet someone made 15 years ago now runs hundreds of millions of dollars" issue. It's hard to know ahead what will be important and sticky or not, even if experience helps. And it's hard to decide how to allocate limited resources too. Infrastructure you build helps you scale properly in the future, but it doesn't do anything for you right now, you might not even know you could need it. And overbuilding upfront might mean there is no tomorrow to worry about anyway.

It's a tough nut, though fortunately it's one area that is probably worse on the black side of things since there is less room for recovery from mistakes. Maybe it's one of the structural forces that can help encourage law abiding behavior, legit companies can mess up badly but still potentially recover if there is enough meat to them, whereas a total opsec break for criminals can mean the end of the enterprise.