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Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

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Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#151

Post by pwg »

arkadiyt wrote: post #137
milkytron wrote: post #83

> Mean words cannot hurt a bank. Threats cannot hurt a bank. Paper trails, though, are terrifying to regulated institutions. Your bank’s customer support representatives are taught to evaluate whether someone looks like they’re competent and collecting a paper trail. If they are, the CS rep is supposed to stop touching the case immediately and instead escalate them to a supervisor or to the legal department. This is…

How do you do this from a technical perspective? I've tried to look for solutions to do this in the past but never found any good options.

From the F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/) store:

Call Recorder: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.axet.callrecorder/

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#152

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

patio11 wrote: post #87
milkytron wrote: post #83

> Mean words cannot hurt a bank. Threats cannot hurt a bank. Paper trails, though, are terrifying to regulated institutions. Your bank’s customer support representatives are taught to evaluate whether someone looks like they’re competent and collecting a paper trail. If they are, the CS rep is supposed to stop touching the case immediately and instead escalate them to a supervisor or to the legal department. This is…

Important not-a-lawyer advice: recording phone calls without the other party's consent is illegal in wide swathes of the U.S., but keeping copies of letters is legal everywhere.

As a maverick not a lawyer, it's worth noting that what this means in practice is that evidence of a crime obtained by illegally recording a telephone conversation may not be admissible in court. I say may not be because a judge could decide to allow the evidence if the alleged crime is sufficiently serious.

It's extraordinarily unlikely a criminal or civil case will be brought against you because you revealed to a company that you recorded a support call to them, especially if the content of those calls reveals impropriety on their behalf.

What probably would be a problem is if you recorded a telephone conversation with the intent to, or actually causing, harm.

At least, that's my lay understanding of how things might go.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#153

Post by traviscj »

g051051 wrote: post #68
weirdstuff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think we need more FUD given what has just occurred. SSN and sensitive financial data of over half of U.S. adults obtained by criminals. Nice.

What "sensitive financial data"?

Card numbers.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#154

Post by didibus »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #152
patio11 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important not-a-lawyer advice: recording phone calls without the other party's consent is illegal in wide swathes of the U.S., but keeping copies of letters is legal everywhere.

As a maverick not a lawyer, it's worth noting that what this means in practice is that evidence of a crime obtained by illegally recording a telephone conversation may not be admissible in court. I say may not be because a judge could decide to allow the evidence if the alleged crime is sufficiently serious. It's extraordinarily unlikely a criminal or civil case will be brought against you because you revealed to a c…

How do you record the consent itself? Or is it going to be a case of he said/she said? I'd assume you'd need proof that you had asked for consent prior.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#155

Post by Asooka »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #152
patio11 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important not-a-lawyer advice: recording phone calls without the other party's consent is illegal in wide swathes of the U.S., but keeping copies of letters is legal everywhere.

As a maverick not a lawyer, it's worth noting that what this means in practice is that evidence of a crime obtained by illegally recording a telephone conversation may not be admissible in court. I say may not be because a judge could decide to allow the evidence if the alleged crime is sufficiently serious. It's extraordinarily unlikely a criminal or civil case will be brought against you because you revealed to a c…

Fortunately, all calls to/from the bank (or at least my bank) begin with the message "We inform you that this call may be recorded."

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#156

Post by mahyarm »

yardie wrote: post #130
patio11 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you live in the United States? In the United States: Where you live affects your credit worthiness. Illegal, and radioactively so. The practice was called redlining and a bank engaging in it would have hellfire rained upon it. Marital status affects your credit worthiness. Also illegal. The degree and school you attended affects your credit worthiness. Untrue; credit reports don't include this information. (It is…

> Do you live in the United States? Yes, we moved here after 15 years of living abroad. > Marital status affects your credit worthiness. They asked for this information. To paraphrase our mortgage broker, "having a 4 year degree makes you much more creditworthy." And I just confirmed it with a family member who works in Fannie Mae, says it's true. Have you looked at a 1003/residentialloan application lately? You and…

What a credit agency retains on you and what a bank asks from you in a loan application are two different things.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#157

Post by quuquuquu »

moduspol wrote: post #139
quuquuquu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to credit suisse, only 33m people in this world have 1m+ USD of assets. So, out of 3.5 billion adults in this world, only 0.7% have the ability to buy a home in a large city in cash. What, then, should the other 99.3% of people do?

It seems odd to extrapolate to the entire world's population of adults, yet rule out the possibility of living anywhere that houses cost less than a million dollars.

Thanks for writing :)

I suppose the issue here is that the "wait and save" approach does not always have success, especially in the Bay Area.

The reason for that is because there is a finite number of houses, and an excessive number of bidders. These bidders use loans and leverage (other people's money) to pay a higher price than they normally would be able to afford.

Thus, waiting and saving is tougher.

Of course this begs the question, why not just avoid the Bay Area?

Unfortunately, most of the tech jobs are there. Other cities don't have the job capacity, despite having plenty of houses.

So, finally, there really only are 33m people on this Earth who can afford to pay cash for a home in the Bay Area.

The rest have to leverage, and thus, are affected by identity theft and credit scores.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#158

Post by pwg »

tertius wrote: post #42
skinnymuch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can spend completely normally and still make money from CCs if you pay them off. Everyone needs basics like food (supplies), transportation costs, and household/hygiene items. Maybe you're better than us, but most people also have utilities like internet and cell phone bills. You likely paid for however you typed that comment. Putting that on a credit card with rewards and paying it off asap wouldn't hurt you one…

> discipline not to over spend Like the discipline to never use Facebook? Extremely rare. And psychologically expensive.

No facebook account here. Never had one, never will have one.

Also pay off CC in full every month, so no interest payments on what are effectively short term loans.

Neither is at all psychologically expensive. However paying off CC in full every month does require sufficient income (and/or restraint in spending for those without the sufficient income) to be able to do so.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#159

Post by nugator »

patio11 wrote: post #87
milkytron wrote: post #83

> Mean words cannot hurt a bank. Threats cannot hurt a bank. Paper trails, though, are terrifying to regulated institutions. Your bank’s customer support representatives are taught to evaluate whether someone looks like they’re competent and collecting a paper trail. If they are, the CS rep is supposed to stop touching the case immediately and instead escalate them to a supervisor or to the legal department. This is…

Important not-a-lawyer advice: recording phone calls without the other party's consent is illegal in wide swathes of the U.S., but keeping copies of letters is legal everywhere.

It is legal in, for example, Sweden: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#160

Post by mahyarm »

cperciva wrote: post #127
tptacek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a really excellent post, the best I've seen you write up this material, and among your top 5 posts ever. Having said that, I'm tentatively going to disagree. I made a conscious, somewhat coerced choice in my early 20s never to rely on revolving credit. A combination of random course-of-business (of course resolved) delinquencies and no history of revolving credit resulted in my having relatively poor credit.…

Every landlord I've rented from has pulled my credit. My credit has always been bad. But my landlord references were spotless, and that's what landlords seemed to care about. Were you trying to rent in a tight housing market? In Vancouver, it's common for landlords to (completely illegally) weed out the tenants they don't want -- in particular, single parents, certain ethnic minorities, and people in low-class occupa…

What happens when you have 10 valid applications as a landlord? Do they even have to tell you the reason why they chose application 3 over all the others? How does that work?
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