PO Box 182789, Columbus, OH 43218 — Who It Is and What to Do Next

If PO Box 182789 in Columbus, Ohio is printed on a letter you are holding, or you are trying to work out where to send a dispute, that box belongs to Comenity Bank — the card-issuing bank behind Bread Financial, which issues store and co-branded credit cards for a long list of retailers. It is not a general mailing address. In Comenity’s own cardholder agreements it has one specific job.

Admitted in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; available to appear pro hac vice in other federal courts.

What this box is actually for

PO Box 182789 is the address Comenity gives for disputing information it has reported about you to the credit bureaus. That is different from disputing a charge on your statement, and Comenity uses a different box for that — one digit apart.

Credit reporting disputes	Comenity Bank, PO Box 182789, Columbus, OH 43218-2789
Billing error disputes	Comenity Bank, PO Box 182782, Columbus, OH 43218-2782

Both figures come from credit card agreements Comenity Bank filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the same two boxes appear with the same two jobs in separately filed agreements for different card programs. If your complaint is that the account is not yours, that the balance is wrong on your credit report, or that a paid account still shows as unpaid, 182789 is the box. If your complaint is about a charge on this month’s statement, it is 182782.

The other Columbus boxes, and why they get confused

Comenity runs several PO boxes in the same Columbus ZIP code, and they differ by three or four digits. Sending a credit reporting dispute to the wrong one is an ordinary reason nothing happens.

PO Box 182789	Credit reporting disputes
PO Box 182782	Billing error disputes
PO Box 182273	General correspondence, lost or stolen cards
PO Box 182125	Bankruptcy department
PO Box 182422	Arbitration notices

Payments do not go to any of these. The payment address is the one printed on your statement, and Comenity’s agreements direct checks marked “payment in full” to a separate street address in San Antonio, Texas.

Who Comenity is, if the name means nothing to you

Comenity Bank and Comenity Capital Bank issue store cards for a large number of retail brands, which is why the name on your credit report often does not match the shop you actually bought something from. Both banks sit inside Bread Financial, the company formerly called Alliance Data Systems, which took its current name in March 2022. The banks themselves have carried the Comenity name since 2012 and still issue the cards.

So a Comenity entry on your credit report may be a card you opened at a furniture shop, a clothing retailer or a fuel brand years ago. People routinely dispute these as fraudulent when they are simply forgotten, and routinely assume a forgotten one is theirs when it is not.

What to put in the letter

Say precisely what is wrong and why, rather than that the report is generally inaccurate. Name the account, the last four digits, the date and the entry you are challenging. Attach proof — the payoff letter, the settlement agreement, the bank statement showing the payment cleared, the police report or identity theft affidavit if the account is not yours.

Include your full name with any middle initial or suffix, your date of birth, your current address and your addresses for the past two years. A mismatch on any of those is one of the ordinary reasons another person’s account ends up attached to your file.

Send it by a method that produces a receipt, and keep a copy of everything including the envelope. If the dispute later becomes a claim, the date you sent it and the date they replied are often the two facts that decide it.

Dispute with the bureaus as well

Writing to Comenity is one half. The Fair Credit Reporting Act places obligations on the company that furnishes the information and on the credit bureau that publishes it, and disputing only with one of them is the most common reason a wrong entry comes straight back. Send the same dispute to whichever bureaus are showing the entry, and keep those responses too.

We keep separate pages on how to do that with Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.

How long it takes

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act a credit bureau generally has 30 days to investigate a dispute, extending to 45 days if you send additional information while the investigation is running. Furnishers such as Comenity have their own duty to investigate what the bureau forwards to them. Disputing costs nothing.

When a Comenity entry becomes a claim

The Fair Credit Reporting Act does not make a bank liable merely for reporting something wrong. What creates a claim is what happens next. If you disputed the entry, the investigation that followed was not a reasonable one, the wrong information stayed on your report, and something came of it — a denial, a worse interest rate, a lost apartment — that is the shape of a case.

Four documents matter most: the entry as it appears on your report, your dispute, the response you were sent, and whatever denial or adverse action notice followed. Keep them together. More on how these claims work is on our credit report attorney page and our overview of claims against data furnishers.

Send us the letter

If you are holding correspondence from PO Box 182789, a Comenity entry you do not recognize, or a dispute response you think is wrong, we will review it at no cost, and you pay nothing unless we win.