Imagine waking up one day and finding out that you can’t get a credit card because someone at the bank screwed up and told the credit reporting agencies that you owed more than $16,000 to Chase. You’d think that this could be easily resolved — but apparently not without getting the local news involved.

A California woman tells CBS Sacramento’s Kurtis Ming that her applications for credit cards were being rejected because of a huge $16,159 stain on her credit report.

Looking into that mystery number, she found that the credit reporting agencies had been told that in 2007, a court ordered her to pay that pile of cash to Chase.

“Wait a minute, I’ve never had this credit card,” she realized. “I think there’s some identity theft going on here.”

She took her matter to the police, but they said it looked more like a matter of a mistaken identity on Chase’s part rather than someone stealing her identity.

The folks at Chase were not exactly helpful in getting the matter resolved, she tells Ming.

“They wouldn’t even write a note that said, ‘This is not the person,’” she claims. “They didn’t want to touch it. So you know, ‘We cannot answer your questions.’”

Nor did credit bureaus TransUnion and Equifax respond to her disputes. Both bureaus deny receiving anything from the woman.

As Ming points out, she could have taken her issue to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB’s Complaint Portal allows people to not only register their issues with banks, credit card companies, lenders, and credit bureaus, it also requires that these businesses respond to each complaint within a reasonable time period.

But amazingly, Chase suddenly began caring about this woman after CBS got involved. She has since received a letter from the bank saying there was never a judgement against her. That letter has been passed on to the credit bureaus, which have cleaned up her credit reports.

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