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The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

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Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#111

Post by superuser2 »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #77
kartan wrote: post #3

How much is this connected to not having a real id card? For me is always weird when you see things like "no flight lists" and it is just a list of names. In Spain or Sweden your ID will be listed and the rest of people named like you spared of being harassed. Another concept that I don't understand is that USA's social security number has to be kept secret or otherwise your identity can be stolen. How that is even p…

> Another concept that I don't understand is that USA's social security number has to be kept secret or otherwise your identity can be stolen. How that is even possible? Doesn't your employer needs it? I think adopting this framing is what makes it really bad. Your identity cannot be stolen. The whole concept of "identity theft" is bullshit intented to shift blame. It only so happens that some entities are incompeten…

> some entities are incompetent at verifying people's identity

Some entities are incompetent at verifying identity because some people are very loud about making sure a a modern ID verification system doesn't get built, because the ability to commit fraud is a civil right or something.

We need .gov smartcards. Or at least a .gov OAuth provider. Instead we are in the dark ages of shared-secret numbers (SSN, credit card, etc) and scans/faxes of easily photoshopped printed cards.

There is an argument this should be a private responsibility. For interactions on an existing account, this makes some sense - banks should be shipping hardware tokens, for example.

The big issue with identity theft is criminals opening new accounts under other people's identities, and this is a serious problem because the government will enforce that debt against people who didn't actually incur it. IMO it is government's responsibility to demand better proof of authenticity before signing up to enforce it.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#112

Post by ThomPete »

zo1 wrote: post #102
ThomPete wrote: post #83

The US is as far as I know the only country in the world who have a positive creditscore system. At least in Europe it's mostly based on a negative creditscore i.e. you are trusted by definition but if you don't pay your bills you end up not being allowed access to credit. In the US they don't trust you per definition and instead you have to prove that you are good with money by basically creating debt and then payin…

It's not the only country in the world to do it. South Africa does it as well. You don't get credit by default, and instead you have to earn it by doing incremental "small" debt-like things. E.g. post-paid telephone accounts, buying small items of furniture on a payment system, etc. Until you do those things, you are most likely going to get denied high-ticket loans such as mortgages and car-financing.

Ok thanks. Good to know.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#113

Post by colejohnson66 »

ghaff wrote: post #91
ourmandave wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the federal government runs it, now they have to own or rent a bunch of land in every major city in every state so they can service id card requests. Don't we already have that with the post offices and the passport system? Couldn't they expand passports into a Federal ID system?

Sure. You could require every American to get at least a passport card. Maybe even waive fees for those below a certain income level. I'm not qualified to comment on constitutional issues so I won't. I will say that, even if it's mostly an emotional issue (people already need at least some sort of state government-issued ID to do lots of things), there's a huge resistance in the US to anything that smells like "paper…

> there's a huge resistance in the US to anything that smells like "papers, please" or universal ID that people are required to carry and present upon request.

And yet, you are, under certain circumstances, already required to ID yourself to a police officer upon request.[0] The most common form of ID? Your driver's license.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify_statutes

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#114

Post by superuser2 »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #19
halviti wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this makes perfect sense and works great in the rest of the world, ID numbers in the US have been talked about, but have faced resistance from two groups.. those that think that this is somehow an invasion of privacy, and those that think that this somehow correlates with the 'mark of the beast' and signals the end of humanity according to the bible. (not joking)

Individual states already issue identification cards, and people use that all the time for this purpose. In a system like the US, I think it's better for the states to handle identification cards, not the federal government. There's a lot of details that go into identifying someone, and your local state is best equipped to handle that. To give a few examples: What's the procedure for changing your name? A lot of peop…

Shared-secret numbers and physical cards are not enough. We need a cryptographic API that lets citizens sign requests to authenticate themselves, such that the signature they emit is only useful for one relying party at one time (not useful if stolen).

Fifty cryptographic APIs, on the other hand, would be a nightmare. We'd at least need the federal government to force states to implement one conforming to some open standard so that the integrations aren't intractable.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#115

Post by SystemOut »

ThomPete wrote: post #110
superuser2 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you are trusted by definition I felt pretty "trusted by definition." Citi gave me a credit card with a $3,000 limit as a college freshmen. A few years later I had an $8,000 limit card and a $10,000 limit card. I bought my car certified-pre-owned under a program that writes favorable low-cost loans to recent college graduates with no or limited credit history (with an offer letter or paystubs). You just aren't truste…

You are american you have a history and your parents have a history. This is not something that you can have different opinions about it's how the US credit history system works by definition. Not saying one is better than the other, it's just how it works in the US.

How do my parent's credit history have anything to do with my credit history in the US? Are you talking about co-signing for loans or possibly how a child can get a card under their parents' name? I didn't think either of those had any impact on the child's credit score.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#116

Post by gareim »

ThomPete wrote: post #108
rco8786 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why you think that is absurdly backwards. Not necessarily disagreeing, but it's not hard to justify wanting to see a history of repayment vs trusting by default.

It's absurdly backwards because it's asking you to create debt which normally is the opposite of showing you are good with money and I would question the validity of seeing people paying back limited debt to be indicative of ex. borrowing for a house. You could instead just look at the history of their debit card usage to figure out whether they are trustworthy. As I said though I understand why they do it, it's just…

>It's absurdly backwards because it's asking you to create debt which normally is the opposite of showing you are good with money and I would question the validity of seeing people paying back limited debt to be indicative of ex. borrowing for a house.

I don't think it's backwards. Debt is only a bad thing if you're being irresponsible about it, so it's like a weedout test. In the other system, can you just buy a house on credit with no credit history? If so, I just find that hard to comprehend.

Also, re: your comment about foreign people, my dad had no issue with it, but maybe you're saying people that are not yet citizens?

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#117

Post by a-saleh »

ThomPete wrote: post #83

The US is as far as I know the only country in the world who have a positive creditscore system. At least in Europe it's mostly based on a negative creditscore i.e. you are trusted by definition but if you don't pay your bills you end up not being allowed access to credit. In the US they don't trust you per definition and instead you have to prove that you are good with money by basically creating debt and then payin…

I don't think you really are trusted by definition in EU at least when it comes to mortgage, because you need to prove you have stable income, even though they won't lend you the full price of the property you put the mortgage on.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#118

Post by swalberg »

bsbechtel wrote: post #99
sschueller wrote: post #14

The whole credit reporting system is a money making racket and there is zero interest in keeping the information in it accurate. No one is held responsible for mistakes and the suffering people go thought because of it.

So do you have a suggestion for a system that works better, or do you prefer banks lend the money from your savings account without any sort of evaluation of how likely it is to be paid back?

I don't think the credit score itself is the problem, it's that it's the only thing banks use. There is no discretion for cases where the mode doesn't have enough information.

As one example that has affected me, I moved to the US a year ago. Go to buy a used car last month with bank statements showing a good salary and enough cash to buy the vehicle outright, a check for 1/3 of the car price, and phone numbers of my employer and landlord. All the banks the finance department contacted automatically denied me without looking at the stuff I brought.

I went to my local bank branch thinking a human might help. I got automatically denied, the manager tried to escalate given the information I provided, but I was still denied.

In the end my loan was through the car manufacturer at a fairly high rate.

I realize I am fortunate in that I can afford to take a crappy loan solely to build a credit history and play this silly game. But the way the model is used treats people who are new to obtaining US credit and people who have used credit terribly virtually identically.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#119

Post by schrodinger »

Karunamon wrote: post #106
ufmace wrote: post #74

Speaking of credit annoyances, I've seen a lot of "dark patterns" appearing on the credit agency websites for ordering your Federally-mandated free annual credit report. Their workflow for getting the credit report is structured to push you towards signing up for some kind of monthly subscription to some monitoring service, to the point where it's very difficult to find the buttons to just get the free credit report.…

The trick there is to stay far away from the individual sites and only use annualcreditreport.com

I've had no problems with creditkarma

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#120

Post by [deleted] »

ThomPete wrote: post #108
rco8786 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why you think that is absurdly backwards. Not necessarily disagreeing, but it's not hard to justify wanting to see a history of repayment vs trusting by default.

It's absurdly backwards because it's asking you to create debt which normally is the opposite of showing you are good with money and I would question the validity of seeing people paying back limited debt to be indicative of ex. borrowing for a house. You could instead just look at the history of their debit card usage to figure out whether they are trustworthy. As I said though I understand why they do it, it's just…

[deleted]
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