Angela Williams filed a lawsuit against Equifax alleging that her Equifax credit report included more than two dozen negative accounts which did not belong on her credit report. The negative accounts actually belonged to another consumer named Angelina Williams. In addition to sharing almost identical names, Angela and Angelina also shared another important similarity - their social security numbers were almost identical except that the last two digits were reversed. Angela sent numerous disputes to Equifax trying to correct its reporting over a period of more than a decade. From time to time, Equifax would remove some of the inaccurate accounts from her credit file but those accounts would later appear in other versions of her credit report. Often times, when Angela would request a copy of her credit report, Equifax would return only incomplete credit reports since Equifax's database had created many different credit files for Angela; sometimes those files were put together into one report and sometimes they were not. As a result of this inaccurate reporting, Angela alleged she was repeatedly denied credit. In November 2007, Angela's case made its way to a Florida jury who entered a verdict in her favor and against Equifax for $219,000 in actual damages and $2.7 million in punitive damages.
