Collection agencies will often agree to do a “pay-for-delete” where you agree to pay them if they delete the collection from your credit report. That’s your number one goal here, because collections will drag your credit down for 7 years.
But first make sure it’s not a scam by checking your credit reports. The best way to do this is at annualcreditreport.com. That’s the source data so it’s not filtered through a commercial credit monitoring site (which includes the three bureaus’ customer-facing websites).
It used to only be available once a year (hence the name), but now you can pull all three reports for free each week. It’s kind of a janky-looking site, but that’s because it’s government-mandated and nobody makes a profit on it; it’s totally legit.
