<prompt> Human: Im really in a bind. Ive moved around several times in my life and now its time for me to find a new apartment complex to rent from with a roommate. In applying for a place to live two things happened. My application was denied due to a judgement for a non payment of rent. This was from a summons to court from non-payment of rent that was promptly paid in full. After the rent was pain in full the court date was dropped and so was the suit. This is the only time in my life something like that had occurred and it occurred in 2012. The current complex I am applying for could not see that I didnt owe the old apartment complex money for this so they denied the application. I worked back and forth with the old apartment complex to obtain proof that I do not in fact owe them any money but they couldnt without a doubt prove that I didnt. Apparently when I moved out they went through a period of transition and lost digital records of me living there. They had to go through cold storage to obtain proof that I even lived there, then to find my rental ledger. On the ledger it states several write offs at the end of the lease and to them that means I owe them a sum of 1787.37. I know I paid rent that last month, and I never received a bill or a collections notice. In fact I had them verify it never went to collections. I moved out in 2013 and was not expecting this now. I have zero proof that I paid rent I think because I paid rent with money orders, I dont know of a way to obtain those again. I did not have a printed receipt of rent paid given to me. I dont know what to do and could use any advice at this point. TL;DR apparently owe money to a place I dont live Edit: spellingUpdate: Thank you everyone for all the replies, a lot of your advice has been extremely helpful. So I took the time today to go to the old apartment complex and gather some more information from them. I learned a couple of new things. First the lawsuit never went to court and therefore is not on my credit report but on a record in a database that most rental agencies use for rental history called leasing agent. Secondly they went through the ledger with me and together we discovered that they dont have record of me paying rent in November of 2012 and April of 2013. In my mind and my argument was that if I hadnt paid those months but continued to live there I would have been evicted. From what I can gather they had some really terrible record keeping with the old management. I think my best bet at this point will be to obtain bank statements from Wells Fargo that I purchased money orders for the amount of my rent on these dates to hopefully prove that I paid rent. The only wrinkle here is I no longer have a Wells Fargo account, so Ill have to go into a branch and speak with a banker.  <response>: The fact that you were sued for non-payment of rent, even though you paid the balance which indicates that you agreed that that amount was owed, indicates to potential landlords that you do not have a history of on-time payments. That in and of itself is enough for a landlord to reject an application.I would focus on repairing your credit report first. It sounds like you have a judgement on your record. This is bad, very bad. Get proof that the case was withdrawn from the court and send this info into the 3 credit reporting agencies when you dispute the claim. Asking for proof of debt does not apply in this case because this is a judgement by a court, not a collection agency. It goes without stating but one should always pull his credit report for review before applying for credit. It sounds like you havent pulled your credit in years?Good luck. 