Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

kalzumeus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 292 posts

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#281

Post by infinite8s »

patio11 wrote: post #85
yardie wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the business of credit agencies to serve as proxies of your credit worthiness. Please, the dogma they preach they might as well be a religion. * Where you live affects your credit worthiness. * How long you live there affects your credit worthiness. * The title of your job affects your credit worthiness. * Marital status affects your credit worthiness. * The degree and school you attended affects your credit…

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 employers routinely verify an employee's salary?

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#282

Post by anitil »

uiri wrote: post #129

I am a shareholder in BigBank. I was therefore profoundly displeased when I learned... This is amazing. It is also trivially true for anyone who holds an S&P 500 index fund or similar when dealing with American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, US Bancorp, and Wells Fargo among a few others.

I didn't understand how smart it was until I read your comment!

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#283

Post by tertius »

skinnymuch wrote: post #273
tertius wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why. Semi-free money. Invest in increasing your income instead. That's my recommendation. Long term thinking.

Can't you do both?

The older you get the more you realize how important it is to focus. Specifically long term.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#284

Post by tertius »

quadrangle wrote: post #262
tertius wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the facts on the ground are that we can't all be rich Yes but it's actually very doable and we can do it while adding value. Be the example that you don't believe exists.

I didn't mean "in reality, we aren't all rich", I meant "in the reality of our economic system and the way it works fundamentally, it is impossible for us to all be rich." Whatever possible route there is to everyone being rich, it involves a fundamentally different economic system. Socialists would have you believe they have the answer to that, but there's good reasons to be highly skeptical. Capitalists don't prete…

When I say the following:

> Be the example that you don't believe exists.

It's in response to you saying:

> of an inherently exploitive system. A trivially small number of them actually added true wealth to the world

And I agree, not everyone can be rich, but on an individual basis it's not that hard.

The good thing about capitalism is that the average quality of life gets elevated. The rich do get richer (which we shouldn't focus on) but poverty also gets eliminated at the same time.

And yes, as you say, people won't act like the utopia we'd like, so it's not perfect. But it's better than anything else by a long shot.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#285

Post by bichiliad »

patio11 wrote: post #12
bichiliad wrote: post #10

I love that this is both informative, seemingly complete, and genuinely useful, and I really hope it gets in front of the people who will need it the most.

It is, somewhat regrettably to me, not nearly complete. This is the Cliff Notes version -- it's biased towards the most useful particular bits for one particular use case and constrained by the fact that I was trying to write it in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon while still having time to play with my kids.

I don't disagree, but I imagine if you need up-close detail on this sort of thing, you'll likely also need an attorney of your own.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#286

Post by quadrangle »

tertius wrote: post #284
quadrangle wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean "in reality, we aren't all rich", I meant "in the reality of our economic system and the way it works fundamentally, it is impossible for us to all be rich." Whatever possible route there is to everyone being rich, it involves a fundamentally different economic system. Socialists would have you believe they have the answer to that, but there's good reasons to be highly skeptical. Capitalists don't prete…

When I say the following: > Be the example that you don't believe exists. It's in response to you saying: > of an inherently exploitive system. A trivially small number of them actually added true wealth to the world And I agree, not everyone can be rich, but on an individual basis it's not that hard. The good thing about capitalism is that the average quality of life gets elevated. The rich do get richer (which we s…

> on an individual basis it's not that hard.

Well, yeah, that's the difference between micro and macro. In a free society without a nobility or class system, it's possible for any one individual to rise from poverty to privilege with luck and hard work. But if it's a zero-sum game where one success is another's loss, then "being the example" isn't an example of anything, it's just being the winner instead of the loser. Of course, most success isn't entirely zero-sum, but it has too many zero-sum elements far too often and is also too-often entirely zero-sum. And some people try to ignore the entire issue of when or whether or how-much some success is zero-sum.

> The good thing about capitalism is that the average quality of life gets elevated.

Crediting "capitalism" here is entirely dubious. The correct credit goes to technology and innovation. There's nowhere near adequate evidence to conclude that capitalism itself automatically increases average quality of life. Perhaps you are mistakenly lumping all of trade and markets with "capitalism"? Markets are often positive for everyone, and trade is generally positive for everyone, raising everyone's quality of life. In our society, probably because of propaganda to this effect, people consider markets and capitalism synonymous sometimes, the same semantic way people in some contexts might consider "moral" and "religious" (or even "Christian") to by synonymous.

In short, if you're just saying that markets and trade benefit everyone generally (but not necessarily), then we have no disagreement there.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#287

Post by stretchwithme »

chrsstrm wrote: post #216
knicholes wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like extortion to me. I wouldn't be surprised if the data leak was an intentional move to provide incentive to people to sign up for their credit monitoring services or unfreeze fees.

When a company "pulls" your credit they are not given the report for free. Equifax and the like sell a credit reporting service to banks and other companies who would want to see your credit history. When you freeze your report, reporting agencies are not allowed to sell your report to anyone, at your request, meaning they are losing revenue. The freeze fee makes sense when you realize your report is the product they…

Maybe what we need is an open source blockchain application that keeps track of every event in your credit history, with YOU authorizing every view.

Every time you use credit, you'd be authorizing that creditor to add events to the records for that use, until they mark it paid off. Otherwise, nothing else gets into your history. And you'd be able to comment on any of those events, of course.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#288

Post by stretchwithme »

stretchwithme wrote: post #287
chrsstrm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a company "pulls" your credit they are not given the report for free. Equifax and the like sell a credit reporting service to banks and other companies who would want to see your credit history. When you freeze your report, reporting agencies are not allowed to sell your report to anyone, at your request, meaning they are losing revenue. The freeze fee makes sense when you realize your report is the product they…

Maybe what we need is an open source blockchain application that keeps track of every event in your credit history, with YOU authorizing every view. Every time you use credit, you'd be authorizing that creditor to add events to the records for that use, until they mark it paid off. Otherwise, nothing else gets into your history. And you'd be able to comment on any of those events, of course.

Of course, it would also need to support multi factor authentication and keep all data related to that secure. Might be hard to do that, but seems pretty hard in the existing industry.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#289

Post by Natsu »

mark212 wrote: post #228
Natsu wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to getting a new cell phone number that apparently once belonged to a deadbeat I know nothing about, I got a large number of debt collector calls. I wish I had a good way to get their address and record who is calling. The only problem is that they all ask for , give me no information about themselves, and hang up right away. I blocked a lot of them, but there's no good way to make that go away.

The federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (47 USC 227) says that each of these calls is worth $500 minimum in statutory damages -- and may be trebled to $1500 per call if shown to be willful. Assuming you live in the US, this is a great case and you should keep track of the calls.

Problem is that they never identify themselves, they just say "we're looking for [xyz]" and hang up when I say I'm not them. I can't keep them on the call and the caller ID is faked to be some random local number.

Re: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

#290

Post by MicroBerto »

mistersquid wrote: post #98

The kalzumeus.com article is informative and accessible, especially if your identity has been stolen. If your identity has not yet been stolen, the NYTimes has an article titled "Equifax's Instructions Are Confusing. Here's What to Do Now." [0] tl;dr: Freeze requests for your credit data at the big 3: Equifax [1], Experian [2], and Transunion [3]. (Note: these services may require multiple attempts, some persistence,…

Don't forget Innovis https://www.innovis.com/personal/securityFreeze
Post reply on HN