I really, really wish I could opt out of having accounts with the big 3 credit bureaus. Freezes don’t appear to work - they usually say that I don’t have an active freeze whenever I go to lift one. Or their website is down entirely. Or they won’t let me get to the freeze section without clicking no on their paid monitoring services 8 times. For Transunion all I needed to lift a freeze was the last 4 of my SSN, so how does that help?
I don’t want to have my information with these companies. Please let me not participate. It’s like every American was given a Chase Bank account at birth that we can’t close, it’s weird.
As someone who grew up in Europe and lives in the US now, the whole "credit" thing is still weird to me anyway. In Germany at least, credit cards are mostly only a thing because they are convenient to pay with online, and then often behave like debit cards (paying directly from your bank account) anyway.
Everyday shopping happens with debit cards, bills are paid by wiring money.
When I came here, I "built credit" by paying everything by credit card and making sure to pay off the entire bill immediately to not incur any interest penalty, but when I read stuff like "always pay off the credit card with the highest APR first", my head's still spinning.
Equifax drives me insane. I can't manage my own freeze with them because they can't validate who I am over the phone (none of other bureaus had a problem).
Instead, I have spent 6+ hours on the phone with them over the last 3 months. I have faxed the requested information 3 times and mailed it once and nothing has been resolved. I've given up. I recently had to have my credit checked for home purchase and I simply told the lenders that I would not be working with them if they could not use Experian or Transunion to verify my credit.
The most insanely infuriating thing about all of is was that when Equifax got hacked, I immediately froze my wife's and my own credit with Equifax. At the time, they required you to create a unique 16 digit key to manage your freeze. They have apparently done away with that, so even though I own the key and can give it to them, it means nothing to them. My wifes account has no issues.
My account will be frozen for life at Equifax, I don't care to waste any more time with them and I the credit system in the US with a passion.
That is one way to be able to solve the problem, but the most direct way to solve the problem of credit scams is to put the onus on the bank who opened up the account incorrectly to assume responsibility for the debt, not on the person whose details were spoofed to create the account.
I am a part of a small but passionate group in Denmark, who advocates for giving everyone an account in the national bank at birth.
This account would be able to attach a featureless debit card (using our national standard payment system "DanKort"), and have the same interest rate as the national Bank (so for now, slightly negative).
Employees of the national bank is already able to get accounts like this. So there is precedence.
This is obviously not a particular attractive not sophisticated "product", but it is awfully hard to hurt yourself with, and will have all the functionality that allows you to function in a modern society.
Make banking a choice, and force the banks to make sufficiently attractive products to convince me to participate willingly.
My favorite part of this system is when they give you a year of it as compensation for a data breach, saying it’s worth 12x its monthly fee (which they make up). That’s not even touching on the fact that their solution to losing your data is asking you for more of it.
I’ve never been lucky enough to be compensated with such a service. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they were so helpful that they even auto-enroll you in another (paid) year at the end of your free trial!
One also wonders why reforming the credit bureaus is not a bipartisan priority in Washington. Congress is apparently only interested in fighting over the issues that nobody can agree on. Don’t hold your breath for any progress fixing systems that anyone except a lobbyist can clearly point to as broken.
The problems might get some attention if the corporate media chose to hype them, but guess who buys a bunch of advertisements on their news channels?
I recently negotiated two service contracts, one for a company that helps administer employment verification (e.g., if an employee applies for a loan), and another with a company that handles COBRA documentation post-termination. Both of these require the service providers hold some confidential information concerning our employees. Both contracts explicitly provided (i) they will not indemnify me for state/federal penalties if they fail to do their job, and (ii) the only remedies they would provide following their data breach is one year of credit monitoring. I told them that was crazy, and if there's a breach they need to indemnify me for all losses and liability, full stop. Both companies refused so I had our broker approach different companies. Those companies proposed contracts with the same terms and also refused to change them. As the employer here merely contracting with service providers, I can't even find contractors who will take this liability on. I would 100% support legislation that would impose on these bastards penalties for the losses associated with their data breaches or failure to provide the services they say they are going to provide. I am also comfortable with the fact that may cost more, but at least then the costs will be internalized by the proper actor. And those who can efficiently provide secure services to me will get my business.
> One also wonders why reforming the credit bureaus is not a bipartisan priority in Washington.
This is a classic “concentrated benefits, disperse costs” problem that is really hard to solve in society. The three credit bureaus have a huge incentive to maintain the status quo, while millions of people have a small incentive to change it. The three credit bureaus are going to fight a lot harder to maintain the system than everyone else will fight to reform it.
It is the same thing you see with our tax system. For individuals, it just isn’t worth it to try to change the system. The effort would cost more than the gain, but the overall cost to society is great.
> One also wonders why reforming the credit bureaus is not a bipartisan concern in Washington.
And one solution might be to simply create a statutory strict liability of $1000 per consumer per breach. The (possiblity of) class action lawsuits would do the rest to encourage correct behavior.
(It might encourage cover-ups as well, but you could penalize that, and incentivize and protect whistleblowing and well-intentioned security research.)
> The best part about this lax authentication process is
> that one can enter any email address to retrieve the
> PIN — it doesn’t need to be tied to an existing account
> at Equifax. Also, when the PIN is retrieved, Equifax
> doesn’t bother notifying any other email addresses
> already on file for that consumer.
Hang on, so the attacker doesn't even need to break into somebody's email account first, they can just guess the questions and put in their own email address?! This is insane.
Security questions in general are a farce. I've started generating random passwords for answers and storing them in my password manager. that at least helps me feel slightly more secure about how ridiculous security questions are.
The days of confirming a person's identity by testing their knowledge on the person's metadata are long past (if they ever existed in the first place).
I don't know what the best solution to this will look like, or if society will ever try to implement one. A lot of people are against having a Federal ID. A private solution will have its own set of problems.
The good news is, its the responsibility of the place that's issuing the credit to do due diligence of confirming an identity. If someone steals your private details and gets approved for a line of credit using them, life will suck for a bit while you sort it out, but you'll never actually owe that money (no matter what the debt collectors tell you).
One of the three's PINs are automatically set, just as the date string from when you froze your credit. Legitimately something like 20191218. You could relatively easily guess them.
One of the three removed the freeze by me just calling and asking, never providing a PIN.
One of the three was alright. I set the PIN to something of my choosing. I had to call, provide all my info and then the PIN to remove it.
The state of credit freezing across the three big companies is an absolute joke.
"Finally, your basic consumer (read: free) account at Experian does not give users the option to enable any sort of multi-factor authentication that might help stymie some of these PIN retrieval attacks on credit freezes.
Unless, that is, you subscribe to Experian’s heavily-marketed and confusingly-worded “CreditLock” service, which charges between $14.99 and $24.99 a month"
It's great to see theyre taking the knowledge that being hacked doesn't matter and putting it to good use
It certainly sounds like a form of extortion to me. "We have a large amount of personal information that can be used to take out loans in your name. We, and others like us, have repeatedly shown that these databases are not secure. They will remain insecure unless you pay us."
The worst part is if you get a FREE credit report with them, they sign you up for this service without you knowing. I was paying $20/month for the bullshit for about a year before I finally caught in. It's a total scam. Did a google search and found MANY other people complaining about the same thing. Their whole company is a scam.
I put a pin on my account after the first Equifax leak. Recently I needed to unfreeze it, and discovered that upon creating a “my equifax” account that I was able to unfreeze it WITHOUT THE PIN. Ive complained to the FTC (including screenshots) but haven’t heard anything. It’s so unbelievably insane these companies are allowed to operate with such massive ramifications to society and individuals!
Funny, I just called to put a Fraud Alert on my credit report. I encourage everyone to do it - so this way reputable lenders are supposed to call you when they're trying to open an account in your name. An attacker would have to port your SIM card as well...
However, all the information I was providing to set the alert, or remove it, is the exact information that any lender would receive on their application. The system if so horribly broken security-wise, I am shocked there aren't more accounts being opened left and right by people who got them from applications emailed to thousands of lenders over the years.
> I encourage everyone to do it - so this way reputable lenders are supposed to call you when they're trying to open an account in your name.
Reputable lender is something like an honest car salesman. Often consumers deal with middlemen and brokers that aren’t bearing the cost of fraudulent transaction.
Isn’t it what partially what caused financial crisis of 2008? Loans were given to people with no income and one, two or even three existing mortgages. Everyone’s incentive was to earn the commission and sell it further misrepresenting low grade bonds as high grade.
> and were surprised to find that just one of the five multiple-guess questions they were asked after entering their address, Social Security Number and date of birth had anything to do with information only the credit bureau might know.
And a lot more than the credit bureau know those two pieces of information.
Honestly, the US really needs a government run public key ID service. The government in providing passports and drivers’ licenses is already doing identity verification. If along with your passport they would allow you to register a public key that people could use to verify your identity, it would be a huge help.
The government PKI actually almost exists already.
Passports have an rfid chip inside them that does something like receive a challenge and respond with a signature over a hash of the passports biographical data combined with the challenge, along with the public key corresponding to the signing key, and a certificate signed by a government key to confirm the signing key is legit.
The government public keys are published, so anybody can verify that someone who claims to have possession of a particular passport really does. The weak point is that as far as I can tell the revocation list is not public, so you can't distiguish between a stolen and not stolen passport.
Not necessarily. The chain of trust doesn't require such a drastic deployment.
In Europe, it's common place to be able to subscribe to loans, or similar contracts online. However, the legislation is VERY strict about requiring very tough MFA-authentication.
Say for example you would want to subscribe to a new credit card. You would either have to go personally to do it (which means they can verify your identity), or you can do it from your Online portal. HOWEVER, if you choose to do entirely online, you HAVE to use your phone as a 2nd factor to authorize the operation.
I'm not saying there's no identity theft. There absolutely is. But they are extremely strict about authenticating each and every (considerable) move.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, a PKI for the US. government is not necessary (in fact, given the time and resistance it took to deploy SECURE ID, I'd say it's dead in the waters right now), and would only require legislators not in the bed with credit card companies, to setup and enforce strict rules for authenticating orders / proceedings.
Passports are federal while driver licenses are issued through the state. If you're suggesting that the public key be linked to a passport, then I'm guessing quite a few states will oppose that on "state's rights" standing.
It’s so incredibly frustrating as a victim of identity theft to have these fucktards give away my information without any form of care. I wish I had the means to sue them into oblivion.
It's important to remember that you aren't the victim of identity fraud: the banks are.
The reframing of the banks being defrauded as the problem/theft of the "identity" of the name mentioned by the criminal when defrauding the bank is a pretty creative and slimy way of a bank de-risking themselves.
Credit scams and identity theft are a problem for us because right now the banks don't have to pay any cost of those mistakes. The most direct way to solve the problem of credit scams and identity theft is to put the onus on the bank who opened up the account incorrectly to assume responsibility for the debt, not on the person whose account details were spoofed to create the account.
Here in Norway, we have this system called BankID - it's a signing system where you can sign documents, and it tends to work great. These days, you can pretty much sign _any_ documents, no mater how important, via the BankID authentication system. It's obviously also 2FA.
But still, it does manage to get abused. Unfaithful relatives / spouses / colleagues / etc. can manage to get hold of your password and device, take out loans or buy stuff, and you're 100% in the jam for it. We get cases from time to time where people are basically held accountable for hundreds of thousands in credit/consumer debt, because someone used their signatures to take out those loans. And probably 99 / 100 times, they lose in court, against the banks.
The banks will argue that if they were held responsible for such actions, the modern fast-tracked system would halt to a grind. It'd be like in the old days where you needed to show up in person, with all your financials, and carefully go through everything just to get a small-ish loan.
It's important to realize that the credit monitoring services you can buy are provided by the credit companies.
The same company, which may at times make false claims about you, is in possession of a service / technology they claim can detect those false claims.
Why is it not libel when these companies make false claims about me? Especially when they advertise that they have the ability to detect such false claims? "Pay us and we will not make false claims about you" they say. "Pay us and we'll double check with you before making claims we believe to be suspicious about you."
The answer is, of course, regulation. To fix this will require more regulation. Contact your Congressional representatives. [1] The CFPB can enforce upgraded financial services policy in this regard once the legislation is enacted. Complaining to them today about this specific security failing is also likely helpful [2].
Freezes and thaws are free. Your credit report, and any scoring mechanisms (FICO), should be available to consumers at any time free of charge. Credit monitoring products should be outlawed. Failures to safeguard citizen data (Equifax) or to promptly remove inaccurate data should incur steep financial penalties.
This is like how those horrible antivirus programs for Windows would constantly warn you that you might have viruses and nag you to subscribe to and pay for their services or your system could be at serious risk. I always thought these companies made at least some of the viruses themselves in an effort to self-perpetuate.
Disclaimer, I work at TransUnion but the following is based on my experience as a consumer.
Since I’m seeing a lot of confusion about how credit reporting is done and how credit monitoring services work let me break it down a bit. Let's say you are getting a new credit card with Chase Bank. When you apply for that credit card Chase does a hard inquiry on your credit report to decide if you are elligible for that card and what credit limit they are going to give you. If they then issue you a card they then report to the credit bureaus that you opened a new line of credit with them and the limit on that line of credit.
If you have credit monitoring you would get 2 notifications. You would get a notification that a hard inquiry was made on your credit report and a second saying a new line of credit was issued to you. The point of credit monitoring isn't for the bureau to catch mistakes but for you to be aware of activity that could negatively impact your credit score. The bureau has no way of knowing if something was legitimate or not since they only have the information that was reported to them. Credit monitoring does however let you know something major happened to your credit which means you now have the ability to respond to that knowledge.
There are 2 important things to remember, all 3 credit bureaus are legally required to give you 1 free credit report per year at your request. You can get it online from https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action or the FTC has instructions https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0155-free-credit-repor... if you want to request it by mail. I have heard a lot of people suggest that consumers should space out requesting the 3 free credit reports so they get one about every 4 months and use that as a form of credit monitoring. It isn't completely fullproof since lenders aren't required to report to all bureaus so something could show up on only 1 report and not the other 2. The second important thing to know is that bureaus are legally required to allow consumers to dispute items on their credit report. The FTC has a sample dispute letter you can use to file a dispute, but some if not all of the bureaus have ways to file disputes online. As someone else in this thread mentioned these disputes generally require some sort of evidence that the reported item is incorrect.
So say I get a credit monitoring alert that says my address has changed because some creditor reported my information incorrectly. Regardless of any other steps I should get that resolved with the creditor because it will probably keep causing issues. But I could then file a dispute with the credit bureau(s) saying that the address is incorrect which would probably require a bill or something to prove my current address (similar to how some state DMVs prove you are a resident).
> A security freeze essentially blocks any potential creditors from being able to view your credit file, unless you affirmatively unfreeze or thaw your file beforehand.
I feel pretty sure they can probably pinky-promise that they really are inquiring about the right person and still do at least a soft inquiry.
Most of the times I've gotten the credit bureau-style security questions (for example, trying to get my credit reports, or trying to open a bank account),
- Every single one is answerable by reference to my Facebook page and a few old area phonebooks [remember when most people used to list their name, phone number, and home address for the world to see? ah yes. good times.]
- And they usually tell me I'm wrong, which would make me suspicious that I was a victim of identity theft, except that the answers I give usually match the data in the report I eventually receive.
When possible fill out the list of security questions with nonsense that you keep a record of/or understand the pattern of answers to. "What's your favorite sport?" "Potato".
I fill them out, screenshot the form and keep that screenshot in an encrypted file that I keep backups of. Not even text searchable that way.
Also completely ridiculous I have to do any of this.
I just generate my security questions as multiple random words in my password manager. I used to just do random passwords but I had to spell the random password with symbols etc over the phone a few times and quit that
Aside from the reported problem, Experian is the worst of the three. Freezing/unfreezing from the website doesn't seem to work, asks for all kinds of PII to be mailed in yikes! Yet it does work (so don't mail anything in!)
Total mess and they seem to have little to no incentive to fix/improve anything
If they mean that the InfoSec is a joke, okay fair enough, but a credit freeze itself is not a joke: it shifts more of the liability to the credit bureaus for allowing your record to be pulled, of in fact that does happen by a scammer. And they notify your device if you set up MFA.
Would anyone here be able to share their experience with freezing their children's credit? We wanted to do this when our kids were born but when reviewing each credit bureau's website, they are all asking to mail paper copies of SSN and birth certificates for each child in addition to the parents' SSN and birth certificates too. There doesn't appear to be any way to freeze a minor's credit online.
I've been exposed to the ludicrous US credit system through my fiancee who was affected by the Experian hack, and frankly, I completely get anyone who wants to see it all torn down. I find it ludicrous there are three different credit bureaus and they all seem to be equally incompetent for something as critical as an attempt to summarize a perception of your trustworthiness into a neat little file.
[+] [-] PascLeRasc|4 years ago|reply
I don’t want to have my information with these companies. Please let me not participate. It’s like every American was given a Chase Bank account at birth that we can’t close, it’s weird.
[+] [-] anyfoo|4 years ago|reply
Everyday shopping happens with debit cards, bills are paid by wiring money.
When I came here, I "built credit" by paying everything by credit card and making sure to pay off the entire bill immediately to not incur any interest penalty, but when I read stuff like "always pay off the credit card with the highest APR first", my head's still spinning.
[+] [-] drunner|4 years ago|reply
Instead, I have spent 6+ hours on the phone with them over the last 3 months. I have faxed the requested information 3 times and mailed it once and nothing has been resolved. I've given up. I recently had to have my credit checked for home purchase and I simply told the lenders that I would not be working with them if they could not use Experian or Transunion to verify my credit.
The most insanely infuriating thing about all of is was that when Equifax got hacked, I immediately froze my wife's and my own credit with Equifax. At the time, they required you to create a unique 16 digit key to manage your freeze. They have apparently done away with that, so even though I own the key and can give it to them, it means nothing to them. My wifes account has no issues.
My account will be frozen for life at Equifax, I don't care to waste any more time with them and I the credit system in the US with a passion.
[+] [-] willhinsa|4 years ago|reply
This is quite humorously illustrated by a "That Mitchell and Webb Sound" skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
[+] [-] AdamHede|4 years ago|reply
This account would be able to attach a featureless debit card (using our national standard payment system "DanKort"), and have the same interest rate as the national Bank (so for now, slightly negative).
Employees of the national bank is already able to get accounts like this. So there is precedence.
This is obviously not a particular attractive not sophisticated "product", but it is awfully hard to hurt yourself with, and will have all the functionality that allows you to function in a modern society.
Make banking a choice, and force the banks to make sufficiently attractive products to convince me to participate willingly.
[+] [-] TechBro8615|4 years ago|reply
I’ve never been lucky enough to be compensated with such a service. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they were so helpful that they even auto-enroll you in another (paid) year at the end of your free trial!
One also wonders why reforming the credit bureaus is not a bipartisan priority in Washington. Congress is apparently only interested in fighting over the issues that nobody can agree on. Don’t hold your breath for any progress fixing systems that anyone except a lobbyist can clearly point to as broken.
The problems might get some attention if the corporate media chose to hype them, but guess who buys a bunch of advertisements on their news channels?
[+] [-] hcurtiss|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|4 years ago|reply
This is a classic “concentrated benefits, disperse costs” problem that is really hard to solve in society. The three credit bureaus have a huge incentive to maintain the status quo, while millions of people have a small incentive to change it. The three credit bureaus are going to fight a lot harder to maintain the system than everyone else will fight to reform it.
It is the same thing you see with our tax system. For individuals, it just isn’t worth it to try to change the system. The effort would cost more than the gain, but the overall cost to society is great.
[+] [-] martinflack|4 years ago|reply
And one solution might be to simply create a statutory strict liability of $1000 per consumer per breach. The (possiblity of) class action lawsuits would do the rest to encourage correct behavior.
(It might encourage cover-ups as well, but you could penalize that, and incentivize and protect whistleblowing and well-intentioned security research.)
[+] [-] rendall|4 years ago|reply
It struck me how reflexively cynical I have become, that reading this question surprised me.
I hope my answer doesn't come off as snarky, but sincerely, there's a lot of good information here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=credit+bureau+lobbyists&ia=web
[+] [-] lhnz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kminehart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jaygles|4 years ago|reply
I don't know what the best solution to this will look like, or if society will ever try to implement one. A lot of people are against having a Federal ID. A private solution will have its own set of problems.
The good news is, its the responsibility of the place that's issuing the credit to do due diligence of confirming an identity. If someone steals your private details and gets approved for a line of credit using them, life will suck for a bit while you sort it out, but you'll never actually owe that money (no matter what the debt collectors tell you).
[+] [-] void_mint|4 years ago|reply
One of the three removed the freeze by me just calling and asking, never providing a PIN.
One of the three was alright. I set the PIN to something of my choosing. I had to call, provide all my info and then the PIN to remove it.
The state of credit freezing across the three big companies is an absolute joke.
[+] [-] thatguy0900|4 years ago|reply
Unless, that is, you subscribe to Experian’s heavily-marketed and confusingly-worded “CreditLock” service, which charges between $14.99 and $24.99 a month"
It's great to see theyre taking the knowledge that being hacked doesn't matter and putting it to good use
[+] [-] MereInterest|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yhoneycomb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|4 years ago|reply
However, all the information I was providing to set the alert, or remove it, is the exact information that any lender would receive on their application. The system if so horribly broken security-wise, I am shocked there aren't more accounts being opened left and right by people who got them from applications emailed to thousands of lenders over the years.
[+] [-] sfink|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeBanKo|4 years ago|reply
Reputable lender is something like an honest car salesman. Often consumers deal with middlemen and brokers that aren’t bearing the cost of fraudulent transaction.
Isn’t it what partially what caused financial crisis of 2008? Loans were given to people with no income and one, two or even three existing mortgages. Everyone’s incentive was to earn the commission and sell it further misrepresenting low grade bonds as high grade.
[+] [-] aeontech|4 years ago|reply
I'm, to put it mildly, not happy, and I've no confidence it's not going to get reset again tomorrow.
Yes, I use a complex randomly generated password.
They do send an email to your previous address on the account notifying you of the fact though, which is the one silver lining.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|4 years ago|reply
And a lot more than the credit bureau know those two pieces of information.
Honestly, the US really needs a government run public key ID service. The government in providing passports and drivers’ licenses is already doing identity verification. If along with your passport they would allow you to register a public key that people could use to verify your identity, it would be a huge help.
[+] [-] scott00|4 years ago|reply
Passports have an rfid chip inside them that does something like receive a challenge and respond with a signature over a hash of the passports biographical data combined with the challenge, along with the public key corresponding to the signing key, and a certificate signed by a government key to confirm the signing key is legit.
The government public keys are published, so anybody can verify that someone who claims to have possession of a particular passport really does. The weak point is that as far as I can tell the revocation list is not public, so you can't distiguish between a stolen and not stolen passport.
[+] [-] aneutron|4 years ago|reply
In Europe, it's common place to be able to subscribe to loans, or similar contracts online. However, the legislation is VERY strict about requiring very tough MFA-authentication.
Say for example you would want to subscribe to a new credit card. You would either have to go personally to do it (which means they can verify your identity), or you can do it from your Online portal. HOWEVER, if you choose to do entirely online, you HAVE to use your phone as a 2nd factor to authorize the operation.
I'm not saying there's no identity theft. There absolutely is. But they are extremely strict about authenticating each and every (considerable) move.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, a PKI for the US. government is not necessary (in fact, given the time and resistance it took to deploy SECURE ID, I'd say it's dead in the waters right now), and would only require legislators not in the bed with credit card companies, to setup and enforce strict rules for authenticating orders / proceedings.
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tristanb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
The reframing of the banks being defrauded as the problem/theft of the "identity" of the name mentioned by the criminal when defrauding the bank is a pretty creative and slimy way of a bank de-risking themselves.
[+] [-] willhinsa|4 years ago|reply
This is quite humorously illustrated by a "That Mitchell and Webb Sound" skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
[+] [-] TrackerFF|4 years ago|reply
But still, it does manage to get abused. Unfaithful relatives / spouses / colleagues / etc. can manage to get hold of your password and device, take out loans or buy stuff, and you're 100% in the jam for it. We get cases from time to time where people are basically held accountable for hundreds of thousands in credit/consumer debt, because someone used their signatures to take out those loans. And probably 99 / 100 times, they lose in court, against the banks.
The banks will argue that if they were held responsible for such actions, the modern fast-tracked system would halt to a grind. It'd be like in the old days where you needed to show up in person, with all your financials, and carefully go through everything just to get a small-ish loan.
[+] [-] Buttons840|4 years ago|reply
The same company, which may at times make false claims about you, is in possession of a service / technology they claim can detect those false claims.
Why is it not libel when these companies make false claims about me? Especially when they advertise that they have the ability to detect such false claims? "Pay us and we will not make false claims about you" they say. "Pay us and we'll double check with you before making claims we believe to be suspicious about you."
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
Freezes and thaws are free. Your credit report, and any scoring mechanisms (FICO), should be available to consumers at any time free of charge. Credit monitoring products should be outlawed. Failures to safeguard citizen data (Equifax) or to promptly remove inaccurate data should incur steep financial penalties.
[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members ("Use GovTrack to find out who represents you in Congress, what bills they have sponsored, and how they voted.")
[2] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/
[+] [-] temporallobe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mulmen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olliej|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fedorareis|4 years ago|reply
Since I’m seeing a lot of confusion about how credit reporting is done and how credit monitoring services work let me break it down a bit. Let's say you are getting a new credit card with Chase Bank. When you apply for that credit card Chase does a hard inquiry on your credit report to decide if you are elligible for that card and what credit limit they are going to give you. If they then issue you a card they then report to the credit bureaus that you opened a new line of credit with them and the limit on that line of credit.
If you have credit monitoring you would get 2 notifications. You would get a notification that a hard inquiry was made on your credit report and a second saying a new line of credit was issued to you. The point of credit monitoring isn't for the bureau to catch mistakes but for you to be aware of activity that could negatively impact your credit score. The bureau has no way of knowing if something was legitimate or not since they only have the information that was reported to them. Credit monitoring does however let you know something major happened to your credit which means you now have the ability to respond to that knowledge.
There are 2 important things to remember, all 3 credit bureaus are legally required to give you 1 free credit report per year at your request. You can get it online from https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action or the FTC has instructions https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0155-free-credit-repor... if you want to request it by mail. I have heard a lot of people suggest that consumers should space out requesting the 3 free credit reports so they get one about every 4 months and use that as a form of credit monitoring. It isn't completely fullproof since lenders aren't required to report to all bureaus so something could show up on only 1 report and not the other 2. The second important thing to know is that bureaus are legally required to allow consumers to dispute items on their credit report. The FTC has a sample dispute letter you can use to file a dispute, but some if not all of the bureaus have ways to file disputes online. As someone else in this thread mentioned these disputes generally require some sort of evidence that the reported item is incorrect.
So say I get a credit monitoring alert that says my address has changed because some creditor reported my information incorrectly. Regardless of any other steps I should get that resolved with the creditor because it will probably keep causing issues. But I could then file a dispute with the credit bureau(s) saying that the address is incorrect which would probably require a bill or something to prove my current address (similar to how some state DMVs prove you are a resident).
[+] [-] economusty|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jfrunyon|4 years ago|reply
I feel pretty sure they can probably pinky-promise that they really are inquiring about the right person and still do at least a soft inquiry.
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfrunyon|4 years ago|reply
- Every single one is answerable by reference to my Facebook page and a few old area phonebooks [remember when most people used to list their name, phone number, and home address for the world to see? ah yes. good times.]
- And they usually tell me I'm wrong, which would make me suspicious that I was a victim of identity theft, except that the answers I give usually match the data in the report I eventually receive.
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myrandomcomment|4 years ago|reply
I fill them out, screenshot the form and keep that screenshot in an encrypted file that I keep backups of. Not even text searchable that way.
Also completely ridiculous I have to do any of this.
[+] [-] milofeynman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emrah|4 years ago|reply
Total mess and they seem to have little to no incentive to fix/improve anything
[+] [-] lr4444lr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbcondo714|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbcondo714|4 years ago|reply
Children Credit Freeze Pages:
• Equifax - https://assets.equifax.com/assets/personal/Minor_Freeze_Requ...
• Experian - https://www.experian.com/freeze/form-minor-freeze.html
• TransUnion - https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/your-money/credit-freeze-...
[+] [-] coolspot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemonocode|4 years ago|reply