Things I’ve learned thru this that I’ve found appalling...
1. Freezing your credit is meaningless thru Experian. You or anyone can obtain your freeze pin using your personal now public info via their tool https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freezepin
2. If you freeze your credit with Experian they send you a letter in the mail saying you will no longer receive credit cards offers for five years. Also that they notified Equifax and Transunion to halt any and all offers to be sent to me. WOW who are these people the mafia? I just wanted to freeze my credit thru them.
Freezing your credit means no company can get access to your credit history. If credit companies can't pre-screen you, you won't get any credit card offers.
> If credit companies can't pre-screen you, you won't get any credit card offers.
Not necessarily true. I have a friend who had a $10k limit credit card opened by someone when their credit was frozen. The company never checked their credit because they recently had a card with them.
For anyone here that likes to earn points, AMEX physical mailers are usually the best signup bonus offers by far, and they are once per person + product so don't burn the bonus applying online for less.
Yes, exactly. I put a promotional block on my file over 20 years ago, and the number of credit card solicitations went to zero. It's never stopped me from obtaining credit whenever I wanted it, though.
That's not at all what it means, unfortunately. A credit freeze stops most hard pulls. That leaves soft pulls and pre-selected offers that can still be used to access the entirety of credit history.
> Does a credit freeze stop prescreened credit offers?
> No. If you want to stop getting prescreened offers of credit, call 888-5OPTOUT (888-567-8688) or go online. The phone number and website are operated by the nationwide credit reporting companies. You can opt out for five years or permanently. However, some companies send offers that are not based on prescreening, and your federal opt-out right will not stop those kinds of solicitations.
The entire credit system is a security nightmare. They all appear to use very basic "security" that has not been upgraded along with the rest of the world. Conflating identity and authorization, using deterministic values instead of random ones when necessary, and even for Equifax plain old sending people to the wrong domain.
> Freezing your credit is meaningless thru Experian.
It can be recovered via all 3 in various ways. Once your identity is "stolen", a credit freeze is completely ineffective if the attacker chooses to use the recovery options and/or contact them via the phone.
There is no "security" in the credit system from the debt collectors to the credit cards to the credit agencies.
It is really unfortunate and proof we can't trust corporations to self-regulate. I wish we could live in a world where people could be trusted to not to fuck over their fellow human beings in the pursuit of money but alas, we do not.
The terms are getting mixed up. A promotional block is different from a credit freeze. The first is a product. The second is a legal requirement on the credit bureaus.
> Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, and Kroger, the second biggest, said they were comfortable continuing to send Equifax their payroll data.
Kroger has a large union workforce. It will be interesting to see if their unions make this an issue and force the data handover to stop.
Quite possibly. I understand some of the demographics information needed for TALX to process the unemployment compliance is salary for each employee covered.
Depends who you work for. If you work for a city, state, or other governmental entity your salary is probably public record and can be looked up online quite easily.
I know this is going to be movie. I can't decide if it will be drama, mystery, action, or comedy. At this point, I'm expecting someone to go on a shooting spree or commit a murder-suicide.
Seriously, Hollywood screenwriters couldn't have come up with a plot this complicated. My favorite part is often overlooked. Earlier this year, they lobbied to remove what few rights we have in case of breaches/losses of PII. As in, they lobbied to not be held accountable or have to give notice in case they were breached. I think that was back in May of this year. There has been so much new information, I can no longer keep track.
If this were a movie, it would suck - because it's too far-fetched and unbelievable. If someone were telling me this story, and I didn't know better, I'd assume they were lying. It has almost reached the point where it is comedic.
Just wait for Fannie Mae's "day one certainty" initiative( starts later this year) services like Formfree's accountchek (you to provide them with your login info for all of your asset accounts so they can verify it for your lender) will be required in order to get a mortgage or refinance.
<sarcasm>What could possibly go wrong with this service.</sarcasm>
Seems like the credit and banking industry is so dependent on the credit bureaus. Is there a way we can have credit cards, loans and mortgages without the need of centralizing pii data?
This seems like a legitimate use-case for permissioned ledgers where various lenders have necessarily siloed lending history data but also have an interest in seeing what data everyone else has for prospective lendees.
In the longer run, you can imagine not just credit history data being exchanged (with the permission of the borrower perhaps) but also the ability to trade the loan products themselves, most of which is done OTC right now. Fixed income contracts can be described as "smart contracts" [1]
That doesn't really fix any security issues, though, it just makes it easier to express who should have permission to access your data. Any system is still vulnerable with, say, a server configured with the credentials admin:admin.
But would that allow me to conveniently omit any negative info from future credit applications? The banks would quickly start sharing this info with one another and become de facto CRAs themselves.
I don't understand why they're proposed as a solution to this type of problem at all. I'm a big fan of blockchains, I work for a company/project completely reliant on them, but I don't get where people think they'll be useful for things like credit monitor and health care records. It makes no sense to me.
Just to play devil's advocate, since I don't think they are a good solution either. Unlike healthcare I think you could use some of the properties of a blockchain to help reduce the risk of leaking personal information during credit checks. For example: you could prove your identity by making a transaction and then show a timely series of past payments.
Sure, we could all pay interest rates that are based upon some amalgamated average risk profile, so you end up subsidizing deadbeats who don't pay their debts.
That would mean that instead of the data being in a single centralized location it's on every single node. That's the opposite of what we need.
Edit: Assuming the colloquial use of the term "blockchain", a public database. In the sense that a blockchain is simply a data structure it's not necessarily a problem but also not a solution.
Not Equifax, but Experian advertises that they "scan the dark web" for your person info which means either they're lying (hopefully) or they're actively contributing to the personal information market by buying information from criminals to see if their customers' data is present.
These credit agencies are nothing but harmful for the majority of consumers.
I saw this commercial too. Utter lunacy. I am not even surprised anymore- these corporations have the green light to do whatever they want. Only wrist slaps for punishment if they do truly heinous things.
Houses wouldn't be so expensive if nobody had access to credit. Nobody would be betting with 5-7x their yearly income.
Fines would work if they were a substantial amount instead of what they are now. Look at the EU fining Google $2.7 billion. If the fine is more than the amount made doing something illegal, companies would think twice.
While fines can help ethical people make the case that they should do the right thing, I am afraid it isn't enough.
What I'm talking about isn't the actual data leak but rather what equifax did or did not do before and after the leak. That is the real crime here. I don't see the CEO and the board facing prison which means we need to change something.
We are a nation of what we choose to be laws and right now it feels like we are a nation where there's no responsibility for the people at the top. Plausible deniability has gone too far. As with everything in life, we need to seek balance and the balance is making sure the board and the CEO have an incentive to ensure the organization isn't systemically violating the spirit of the law.
We are a nation of laws but laws aren't something we got from the mountaintop. We need to tweak things sometimes.
You know how it's surprisingly easy to trick confidence tricksters? Well, it's surprisingly easy to steal PII from criminals who steal data too. Experian bought CSID. CSID specialises in that sort of work.
So maybe Jim Bob knocked off a web site for fans of My Little Pony and got all their plaintext passwords. He offers the list of accounts for $5 on a Tor hidden site. Steve the CSID employee guesses that Jim Bob is too lazy to change the password each time he does this, and types in "opensesame" to get the data for $0. CSID (and thus Experian) tells the MLP fans their account data was compromised.
Now they have my attention! If the hackers got that data, I really hope they make it public. Imagine the shit storm that would follow. Those women who are "bad negotiators" would know EXACTLY how much less they were making for the same work. Please please please, dump that specific info! It would also teach all our companies a lesson about selling that private data too, wouldn't it?
Sorry to hear that. If you haven't researched it yet, you may be surprised how much govt assistance is available for sick people in the US. Short term disability insurance is provided by most employers and some states and is usually 100% tax free. SSDI and Medicaid also help a lot of people.
If you're sick enough to be paying a large fraction of a years salary in healthcare expenses, the better bet may be to stop working entirely and get on Medicaid, SSDI, TANF, etc. until you are back on your feet.
But you did say debt which means it's likely you're well past this point.
I don't want to take away from your comment, but my mother spent 4 years attempting to obtain disability (and along with it Medicare), only to die 4 days after her final denial letter at the age of 59.
53% of disability claims are denied, and the average SSDI payment is $1171/month. Having helped my mother through the disability process, as well as helping build tooling for disability advocacy non-profits, I can tell you how little government assistance is available to sick people in the US.
Are there services available? Possibly. Can you count on receiving them? Absolutely not.
Agree 100% on the SSDI - it all comes down to the specific condition. Some are easy (Blue Book listings with definitive diagnosis) and some are not at all. Getting Medicare through SSDI will take ~30 months so not too helpful.
Medicaid at least, the only qualification is not having too much income. Medicaid I think is way better than Medicare, at least in the states I would live in.
Yeah to echo what zaroth has said, definitely see if you can get on SSDI. It is complex to get a calculated amount, but you deserve the money and I really hope it helps you out.
Additionally I can't remember if I hallucinated it, but a lot of lenders have stopped looking at medical debt! Seriously! I read it in a few different places but I don't have official info for you. Lenders would have nobody to lend to if they considered medical debt.
I once had a psycho hospital misbill me using fake insurance codes and etc for routine work. My insurance company refused to pay because of the codes the hospital billed me for. So I said lol I'm not giving you $800 for a free physical. They screamed and shouted that they'll see me at collections.
Three years later and it never showed up on any of my credit reports. Get you some of that!!
Most of my large medical bills end up going to a debt collector and they tend to 2-3 times a day per collector. But, they're not jerks on the phone at least, and try to setup a payment plan.
However, I had one MRI that was ~$2000 (typical) and after ~6 months they lowered it to like $400-600. That's the only time any medical provider cut me a deal. Oh, actually, one debt collector gave me a large discount for paying it all in a one-time payment.
But I've never had someone simply "not" attempt to collect their debt.
Naive question: Why would credit reporting companies resist allowing consumers to freeze their credit? I would think, if anything, it provides them another data point and does not otherwise affect their business at all. Is there something I am overlooking?
Credit reporting agencies make the VAST amount of their money by giving your reports to companies that ask for it, even if unsolicited by you. Putting a credit freeze kills this ability to make money off you without your knowledge.
In fact, I think one way to do more consumer-safe credit reporting is to make it so that agencies are ONLY allowed to give a person's report to that particular person. When a person applies somewhere for credit, they would need to ask a credit agency for their report, and then give it to a prospective lender (the report would be cryptographically signed). That way you at least control who has access to your information.
It absolutely affects their business; they are paid by companies that want to check your credit, and freezing means they can't get paid by all those credit card companies that send you random offers after seeing that your credit is good.
Seems like the easiest way to do this would be to use all the data from this breach to create a massive amount of noise in the credit system, making it virtually impossible for people working for these companies to do their jobs.
A bit of both, really. Users of fiat money have to trust the government's effective use of force in supporting the transactional utility of the currency.
Examples of this sort of failure might be a hyperinflation scenario. Governments could try to place controls on wages or prices, but might (and will likely) still fail. Many historical examples of it.
Force helps, but all that’s really necessary for a fiat currency to have worth is for users to trust that it will remain reasonably scarce. Example: Bitcoin. In the case of traditional government-issued currencies, you’re trusting in humans rather than an algorithm, and that trust can be broken (which is what happens in a hyperinflation scenario), but it still exists in normal scenarios.
(And even Bitcoin’s value is in part based on trust in government - specifically, that various governments won’t ban it. A ban might not be 100% effective but would clearly decrease its utility and thus its value; recent events wrt China are a small-scale demonstration.)
all that’s really necessary for a fiat currency to have worth is for users to trust that it will remain reasonably scarce
... and that other people will accept it in exchange for goods and services. Scarcity alone is no guarantee of that. For the vast, vast majority of people Bitcoin is literally worthless - the only thing you can do with it is attempt to convert it into real currency so you can actually use it for something. And they would rather you did that rather than trying to fob them off with a bunch of numbers.
Don't understand why this is down-voted because it brings up a valid point.
The Financial Services sector is heavily regulated because of the importance of trust and correct information. You can bring the system to an immediate standstill since most of the automation in the sector relies heavily on credit bureau data.
I believe Amazon, Tesco, etc actually would hold now the most accurate information about customer repayment ability in the retail segment.
Regarding the 'correct information' you mention... I have never had a very 'active' credit history, I just don't borrow a lot. But when I went to buy my house, I pulled my credit report to see what its status was and do a sanity check. When I did, I found an error. What surprised me is that it was an error that was false on its face. It was an impossible entry. To this day I am perplexed how such a thing could exist on a credit report at all without being caught by even the most basic data consistency checks. It claimed, roughly, that on say July 2000 I had a balance of $0 on an account with a furniture company... and 30 days later, on August 2000, I was more than 180 days overdue with a balance of -$300 with that same company. Given that it is quite difficult to pack more than 180 days into the span of 30 days, I can only conclude that they just accumulate errors and do not value either correctness or basic sensibility.
Luckily I was able to easily get the error removed, but it seems absurd to me that a clear system error of some kind had simply persisted on my report for years.
1. Freezing your credit is meaningless thru Experian. You or anyone can obtain your freeze pin using your personal now public info via their tool https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freezepin
2. If you freeze your credit with Experian they send you a letter in the mail saying you will no longer receive credit cards offers for five years. Also that they notified Equifax and Transunion to halt any and all offers to be sent to me. WOW who are these people the mafia? I just wanted to freeze my credit thru them.