Most people meet Shellpoint the same way: a letter arrives saying the servicing of their mortgage has moved, and the name on it is one they have never heard of. The loan itself does not change — same balance, same rate, same terms — but the company taking the payments, holding the escrow and reporting the account to the credit bureaus each month is now a different one.
What Shellpoint is, and why people ask whether it is a debt collector
Shellpoint Mortgage Servicing is a mortgage servicer. A servicer is usually not the owner of the loan; it is the company paid to administer it — taking payments, managing escrow, answering the phone, and reporting the account to Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
The question people actually type is whether it is a mortgage company or a debt collector. The honest answer is that the distinction matters less than it sounds. What matters for your credit report is that the company reporting your mortgage each month is a furnisher under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and that carries duties whatever else it is called.
Servicing rights are bought and sold, and they move without the borrower agreeing to it. That is ordinary and by itself is no sign that anything has gone wrong. The narrower question is whether the account survived the move intact.
Where a servicing transfer goes wrong on a credit report
A transfer is a bulk migration of loan data between two companies’ systems, and the errors it produces have a recognizable shape:
- Payments made to the old servicer that never arrive at the new one, reported as missed months.
- Both servicers reporting the same mortgage at once, so one debt appears on the file as two.
- A balance that a loan modification changed, still reported at the pre-modification figure.
- A loan discharged in bankruptcy still reported as owing, or carrying a balance after discharge.
- Escrow shortfalls treated as delinquency, so a dispute about taxes or insurance becomes a late payment on your file.
- The transfer date recorded wrongly, opening a gap that reads as non-payment.
A mortgage is usually the largest account on a credit file. One mis-reported month on it moves a score further than almost anything else, and it does so at the point people are least able to absorb it.
What the law requires of the company reporting your mortgage
A company that reports information about you to the credit bureaus is a furnisher under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Those duties are not discretionary.
When you dispute an item with a credit bureau, the bureau must conduct a reasonable reinvestigation, and the furnisher must investigate, review what the bureau sends it, and report back. If the information turns out to be inaccurate or incomplete, it has to be corrected with every bureau it was reported to.
Whether that actually happened is recorded in the companies’ own systems — the dispute file, the automated codes passed between bureau and furnisher, and the record of what a human being reviewed, if anyone did. Those records come out in a case and nowhere else. A dispute is answered by whatever a company chooses to tell you; litigation is answered by what it has to produce.
Dispute with the bureaus, not only the servicer
This matters more than it sounds. Telling a servicer it has made a mistake is sensible and worth doing, but the furnisher’s investigation duty is triggered by a dispute filed with a credit bureau. A complaint made only to the company can leave the strongest part of a claim unavailable.
Send the dispute to Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, in writing, with the documents proving the entry is wrong, and keep proof of when you sent it.
What the statute allows
For a negligent violation, a consumer may recover any actual damages sustained as a result of the failure, together with the costs of the action and reasonable attorney’s fees as determined by the court.
For a willful violation, a consumer may recover actual damages or statutory damages of not less than $100 and not more than $1,000, plus such punitive damages as the court may allow, and again costs and reasonable attorney’s fees.
On a mortgage the actual damages are usually easy to point at: a refinance declined or priced higher, a home equity line refused, an application on a second property denied, and the months spent trying to correct something that would not be corrected.
The deadline
An action must be brought no later than two years after you discover the violation, or five years after the violation occurred, whichever comes first. Servicing transfers and dispute cycles both run in months, so write down the date you first saw the error.
What to send us
- The transfer notice, and the date servicing changed
- Your credit report from each bureau, showing how the account is reported
- Proof of the payments in question — bank records, confirmations, canceled checks
- The modification agreement, discharge order or payoff letter, if one applies
- The dispute you filed, to which bureau, and proof of when
- Every response, including any letter saying the item was verified
Pull all three reports rather than one. An account reported correctly at one bureau and wrongly at the other two is itself evidence about the investigation.
What it costs
The fee provision is written into the Act: in a successful action the costs and reasonable attorney’s fees are recoverable from the defendant, as determined by the court. That is why this work is handled on a contingency basis rather than billed by the hour.
You pay nothing unless we win.
Where your situation fits
If your loan moved to a different servicer, see our page on Select Portfolio Servicing and your credit report, which covers the same transfer problems. If your loan is administered by a subservicer for the bank that owns it, see our page on Cenlar. If the bureau is the one refusing to correct the entry, see the credit bureau lawyer page. If you are still at the dispute stage, start with credit report dispute lawyer. Where a dispute has already failed and the question is who can be sued, the FCRA lawsuit page sets that out. Our directory of mortgage servicers lists contact details for the major companies.
Have your report reviewed
The Kim Law Firm represents consumers in Fair Credit Reporting Act cases against mortgage servicers, the credit bureaus, the specialty reporting agencies, and the companies that furnish information to them. Send us the transfer notice and your reports and we will tell you whether we see a claim.
Contact us to have your credit report reviewed.
Admitted in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; available to appear pro hac vice in other federal courts.
This page is about credit reporting accuracy. The Kim Law Firm is not affiliated with Shellpoint Mortgage Servicing or NewRez LLC, and this page is not a complaint about that company. It describes how mortgage servicing transfers can produce credit reporting errors and what the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires when they do.