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Probably they assumed that most people don't have credit monitoring yet and only a few people would go for the $125 option.
In any case, I'm not going to trust any of these greedy doddering fools with my information. Their job ALREADY involves monitoring my credit.
My understanding was that the equifax settlement was for 6-700 million, yet this page indicates that there is only 31 million set aside to cover cash payouts to class members. I'm curious about where the rest of the money went. Does anyone know?
It makes sense when you think about it: if you woke up in the morning and your credit score had dropped 50 points, and they told you it was because they changed the rules, you would say that it was unfair. And so the calculation method hasn’t changed since the 50’s. My guess is, some guy with a crew cut and horn rim glasses lit up a cigarette, threw back a shot of whiskey, got out his number 2 pencil and just wrote a bunch of stuff down on a piece of paper, and that’s still how credit scores are done.
But even if it was originally a useful metric, and even if it somehow remained valid after all this time, it still would be useless, because once you make a metric into a target, it stops being a useful metric.
So the question is: why do people still use credit scores?
The answer is simple: it’s a game we play. It’s like the kobyashi maru of finance: the only way to win is to cheat. There are all kinds of ways to hack your credit score, by opening up a line of credit you don’t need and paying it off really fast, whatever. And what they are looking for is the people who will play along, who will do whatever it takes to get a high score, even knowing the score is meaningless, because the kind of person who is willing to do that is also the kind of person who is likely to have a lot of money.
And that’s why we use credit scores.
We're all supposed to take it as just a fact of life now that we need a monitoring service for a service none of us opted in to. And who runs these monitoring services? Why of course, it's the credit reporting companies! Who else would it be. So not only do they know when fraud is happening to you, but they will happily ruin your life while knowing and charge you for the privilege of knowing this is happening to you.…
Unfortunately, most of us did opt in. If you look at the credit agreements we sign when we buy cars, open credit accounts, enter into a mortgage, we give the lender the privilege to share our data with these credit reporting companies.
Granted, I could just not understand what’s in the contract.
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If you could build a better algorithm to do underwriting, you could make billions. Companies try all the time like zest finance.
Not being the worst is not the same as succeeding. Following that logic the Burj Khalifa is a space elevator because no one has been able to build a better space elevator than that. I have general objections to this sort of underwriting assessment being an ethical business for a private organization to begin with due to the immense amount of possibility for discrimination it opens up.
While there are certainly some arguments to be made about disparate impact under our current system basically everyone agrees that access to credit for minorities is much much better than it used to be.
This is a gross oversight on behalf of the FTC. Is it possible to sue them for negligence?
We should. It looks like FTC isn't on our side.
> The free credit monitoring provides a much better value, and everyone whose information was exposed can take advantage of it. If your information was exposed in the data breach, and you file a valid claim before the deadline, you are guaranteed at least four years of free monitoring at all three credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) and $1,000,000 of identity theft insurance, among other benefits. The market value of this product is hundreds of dollars per year.
The "market value" they quote is the price tag that Experian would like you to pay, but the actual marginal market price that Equifax pays Experian is $16/claimant.
well.. when individuals lose a court battle, they owe the winning party money from their future earnings, in case their current balance does not cover the sum owed. Why don't they make companies do that. It would only seem fair for the amount of damage they did :|
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, most of us did opt in. If you look at the credit agreements we sign when we buy cars, open credit accounts, enter into a mortgage, we give the lender the privilege to share our data with these credit reporting companies.
I'm aware this is legally the case, but I think this is yet another sign that default opt-in isn't a legitimate agreement, society has become pretty litigious and I think some of the understanding around default opt-ins during enrollment for other services and third party data sales need to be revisited. I find them to be highly unethical and to generally result in a contract negotiated without compensation and any c…
Are you saying these two ideas are related? If so, I don't quite see the connection -- can you expand a bit?
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I had a recent 30 day delinquent payment reduce my credit score by 80 points. And this was because the letter in the mail was mid-delivered. Not that the credit card issuer, nor the credit agencies give two shits. This was after about 5 hours of calls ping-ponging between the two.
I've had credit card companies call me and straight up say "If you pay this right now over the phone with me and pay the $15 telephone transaction fee, this won't hit your credit report" Between the "Pay for Delete" scams and the gamifying of your credit score through services like CreditKarma I really questions how close these scores are hitting anymore in relation to relative credit risk.
Does that not qualify as extortion?
Does this mean that credit thieves will just wait until after the free monitoring period ends and start opening up accounts with their stolen identities then?