Credit Rating Bureaus Join the War Against Regular Folksby bink - DailyKos
SUN MAY 15, 2011 AT 06:56 AM PDT
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This just sucks.
From the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/your-money/credit-scores/15credit.html?_r=1The credit rating bureaus, whose reports influence everything from credit cards to mortgages to job offers, have a two-tiered system for resolving errors — one for the rich, the well-connected, the well-known and the powerful, and the other for everyone else.
The three major agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, keep a V.I.P. list of sorts, according to consumer lawyers and legal documents, consisting of celebrities, politicians, judges and other influential people. Those on the list — and they may not even realize they are on it — get special help from workers in the United States in fixing mistakes on their credit reports. Any errors are usually corrected immediately, one lawyer said.
If you are rich and powerful, you get special help from the credit bureaus in resolving errors and disputes.
...
There is only one reason that this could happen:
The credit rating bureaus are afraid of crossing powerful people. They know that their business model is so shady and that their processes are so horrendously error-prone and antagonistic to consumers ... If someone with power and influence was subjected to the abuse that we deal with every day, laws would be to passed to prevent the abuses.
So, what happens to the rest of us when there is an error on our credit reports?
From the article:
For everyone else, disputes are herded into a largely automated system. Their complaints are often electronically ferried to a subcontractor overseas, where a worker spends, on average, about two minutes figuring out the gist of the matter, boiling it down to a one-to-three-digit computer code that signifies the problem — “account not his/hers,” for example — and sending a dispute form to the creditor to investigate. Many times, consumer advocates say, the investigation translates to a perfunctory check of its records.
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Link:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/15/976224/-Credit-Rating-Bureaus-Join-the-War-Against-Regular-Folks?via=siderec:kick:
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