Experian sold consumer data to identity thieves' service

boing
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Penalty? They should cease to be in business after this.

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Experian is in roughly the same category as Lockheed Martin or Goldman Sachs in terms of touchability…

We’re talking ‘might deign to negotiate a settlement agreement without admission of guilt’ territory.

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I disagree; I think it is quite certain that they will not.

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Tyler Durden was right!

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I think it’s telling that if you go to the FTC website looking for a free credit report, they explain that these are provided by three different companies, and then spend about 5 pages explaining, in essence, that they are all crooks trying to rip you off, and how to carefully navigate their sites in such a way as to not have them start charging nonsense to your credit card. My girlfriend and I recently needed credit reports (never ask for a credit score if you can help it) and I managed to get it from two, but the third was intentionally broken on the “free” path and instead redirected you to their scam pages (filed a complaint with the FTC, for what it’s worth). My girlfriend got scammed, though, to the tune of about $80 by the time we noticed the charges on her credit card.

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Yeah, I gave up and used the phone.

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I bet the third was Experian.
I had the same experience.

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Can corporations be charged under RICO? “Nice credit score you got there, kid, it’d be a shame if anything were to happen to it. ::knuckle cracks::”

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I ran into the “You’ll have to call us” problem, after using Experian’s website. Didn’t bother calling them.

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If you want knowledge about your credit score, I suggest using CreditKarma.com. It’s like Mint.com but for credit score tracking and improvement, and tells you the reasons you score is what it is. Pulls data from TransUnion and updates multiple times a month. Totally free.

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In addition to these or the official annualcreditreport.com, Quizzle will also pull your credit report from one of the three (forget which) every six months for free.

I’m always bothered by the machine-generated security questions based on mined data the bureaus use, because quite often their official answers are wrong, and they use those answers to make it more difficult for me to access the legally-required-to-provide-to-me annual credit report.

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Adobe recommended Experian’s ProtectMyId.com in their “We’re Sorry” letter sent out to users. Awesome.

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The irony of one of “The Big Three” credit reporting companies being in a position where they have to pay for ID protection services for a bunch of their customers is delicious.

edit: I hope they’re not allowed to “give away” their own ID protection service, because that product is clearly worse than useless.

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In my experience, the questions were correct – if I were my father.

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Rant Casey!

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I’d like this post for it’s truth, but I actually hate the truth of it. So I didn’t ‘like’ it, though it is a good post.

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Credit reporting is criminal at a fundamental level. When handling money equals human value, we have a serious problem valuing humanity. Period.

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This is the same type of corporation that will drop your credit rating down if you check your own credit rating, right?

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Nothing happens if you check your own credit rating. Applications for credit, however, can lower your score.

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