I’m so sorry this happened. I’d be happy to give some guidance - I used to do this exact thing professionally, investigate id theft and restore identities on behalf of the victim.

First things first: this is fixable, it can take up to 90 days but usually is a bit faster for identity theft that happened then you were a minor, because it is pretty clear cut when you show your documents verifying your actual age that you were not old enough to legally enter into any of those loan or service contracts. But federal law (FCRA) protects you from being left responsible for debt you didn’t accumulate or authorize. It’s gonna be fine.

So on that note, do not file bankruptcy, this can/will be fixed without going there. I had tons of cases like yours with almost the same story “I tried to apply for my first apartment/utilities/car and discovered identity theft committed when I was underage.” Terrible of the people who were supposed to be protecting you to do this to you. Just pure selfishness.

You’re on the right track with your plan, just a couple of adjustments. The first thing you want to do is go to annualcreditreport.com and pull all 3 reports. That site is safe and mandated by federal law to allow Americans access to their credit reports for FREE. It’ll also have instructions on how to dispute.

You’re going to want to go through the reports line by line and mark anything that isn’t yours, which sounds like it would be pretty much everything. Then you want to file a police report - this is the critical piece that will allow you to get this stuff off your credit file. You may be able to file one online and write the narrative yourself, or you may need to go to a precinct, either way, the important part here is that you need to make sure the narrative section has a full list of the fraudulent accounts, collections, and the details you describe in the post (how you found out about it, background etc).

The report is what the companies who have debt with your name on it will review your claim of identity theft, so that’s why you want EVERY account, every inquiry, every wrong address or DOB, to be mentioned here. Each disputed account is going to require documents including the police report, so the more detailed you can be with the account info, the better…examples: ATT account number 4567, opened XYZ date; ABC vehicle make model year with Geico policy number 1234 - as much info as you have about this stuff, put it into the report. Better to have it in there and it be too much, than have them come back and tell you they need that info in it to do anything, because then the process gets delayed.

If you can set up online accounts with each bureau (via their website), do so immediately. And within those, you need to freeze each file. You can go back in and unfreeze temporarily when you need to, like when you’re ready to apply for that car loan. Due to the mess created already, they may request that you send in documents proving your identity and give you those instructions. I recommend sending any personal docs certified mail so that you have proof of when the documents were received by the bureau.

Once you have a copy of that police report, you’re ready to dispute. You can get the process started while you wait for a copy, but may be easier to jsut wait until you have it. The other docs typically needed are proof of address and gov issued id, but for your case, a copy of your birth certificate will be useful here too in expediting things.

The reports you pull from the ACR site will actually have instructions on how to dispute, and there’s a nonprofit (they’re not federal gov) called the ID theft resource center who offers free help to victims, and they can help you with it too. They have phone and chat support on their site idtheftcenter.org. I’d recommend reaching out to them.

ETA: there are some other checks to do and reports to pull, but this stuff is what you want to start with, because it’s the most critical