Credit Repair for Survivors of Human Trafficking

NCCASA now provides a new service that helps survivors with one of the steps to repair their credit. As part of the Debt Bondage Repair Act, survivors can remove adverse information from their credit report that is related to events that took place during and after their human trafficking experience. Poor credit bars survivors from things like housing, employment, or car purchases.

Survivors of human trafficking can have specific information blocked from their credit reports. Some examples provided by Polaris Project include: “prior evictions, late rental payments, credit card or loan defaults, unpaid bills that went to a collection agency, criminal convictions that were the result of a trafficking experience, and bankruptcy filings.”

Survivors must provide the following information for eligibility:
1. Proof of identity
2. Victim Determination Documentation
3. A list of what needs to be blocked that was a result of a survivor’s trafficking experience

NCCASA is an NGO authorized by the NC Department of Justice that can provide a Victim Determination Document (VDD): a signed document stating/attesting a person is a victim of human trafficking, as it is defined by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000:

● Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining,patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act, in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the personinduced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age (22 USC § 7102).

● Labor trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery, (22 USC §7102).

To request information about obtaining from NCCASA a signed Victim Determination Document for credit repair as specified under the Debt Bondage Relief Act, please email [email protected] or call 919-871-1015.