Have you ever experienced the crippling feeling of trying again and again to get a company to correct an error? Well, one Oregon woman experienced that exact feeling for two years before taking matters into her own hands. Her prize? An $18.6 million court decision in her favor.

Meet Julie Miller of Marion County, Ore. In 2009 she was denied credit from Huybbard Bank, and when she queried them on how that could happen, Miller found that her denial stemmed from information on her Equifax credit report. It was then that she went to Equifax to see just what was on this report.

On her credit report from Equifax, Miller found all sorts of erroneous claims and information. The report had an incorrect social security number, the wrong birthday, and incorrect collection accounts attributed to her.

Easy enough fix, right? Well, Miller got on the phone with Equifax to fix the erroneous information, but soon found that this was just the beginning of her headaches. Time and time again Miller called Equifax to fix their mistakes, and time and time again the issue remained unresolved. After two years, she decided to finally bring the company to court.

"There was damage to her reputation, a breach of her privacy, and the lost opportunity to seek credit," said Justin Baxter, who worked on the case with his father and law partner, Michael Baxter. "She has a brother who is disabled and who can't get credit on his own, and she wasn't able to help him."

What's more, it appears that Miller's account information had become mixed with another person's credit reports, and so Miller received that person's sensitive information and vice versa. Miller's lawyers think that such a careless exposure to fraud played heavily into the decision, as did their client's behavior.

"She did what you're supposed to do. She didn't go running straight to the courthouse," noted Baxter. "We found that when complaints would come in, they'd run them through a scanner and then send them overseas."

In total, Miller tried eight separate times to get Equifax to change the information, but her attempts seem to have been thwarted by the company's outsourcing of such matters to the Phillippines. The $18.6 million judgment is the largest awarded to a consumer against any of the major credit bureaus, though it is likely that Equifax will appeal the ruling.