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Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

thefintechtimes.com

101–110 of 112 posts

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit Karma provided intuit with $475m in revenue for its Q4’22 earnings. Inuit posted a loss but I suspect credit karma was break even or slightly profitable. https://s23.q4cdn.com/935127502/files/doc_financials/2022/q4...

I guess your suspicion and my suspicion can argue about it until there is data.

The latest 10-K breaks out operating segments. Credit Karma had operating income of 531M on revenue of 1805M.

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#102
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have no reason to believe the credit reporting services are aware of my physical location So did you lie about your address on the credit card application? If not, that’s how the bank knows you don’t live in the US and that’s why you were rejected. Lemme simply: Either you need credit history in the US or you need to live in the US. You fail both criteria. Maybe your rejection letter only mentions the first reason,…

You seem hostile. Not sure if it's your intention, but ease up. > So did you lie about your address on the credit card application? If not, that’s how the bank knows you don’t live in the US and that’s why you were rejected. I didn't lie on anything, and frankly a bit offended you would even assume such. I travel back and forth to the US, often. My home address (one of the properties my family owns, and where I lived…

You are being very cagey with where you actually live. "My family owns a house in the US" doesnt make you a resident. Do you pay US taxes?

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your guess is wrong, their Q2 revenue this year was reported $444M

Revenue != Profit

Yes..... and the only way a $444M quarterly revenue company "aren't profitable at all" is if their costs are >$444M / quarter. That's what my comment was getting at. Does GP really think a business like CK costs that much to run?

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#104
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your guess is wrong, their Q2 revenue this year was reported $444M

Revenue is not profit. Revenue - expenses is profit. You can pump your revenue as high as you want by selling dollar bills for 90 cents.

Obviously this is true but CK doesn't sell dollar bills for 90 cents.

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#105
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wouldn't be surprised to find that 90% is actually very close to reality The FTC press release[1] says "for many offers, almost a third of consumers who applied were in fact denied". That's quite a ways off from 90%. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/09/... edit: >Also, Credit Karma gets paid for successful conversions, and maybe ad placement? It doesn't seem like misleading someone got…

If a third of consumers _should_ have been denied because they were not credit-worthy, then there were no errors. You need to look at the false negative rate, not the absolute number of people denied for financial products.

I think the misleading part was representing it as that person specifically had 90% chances, even though 90% may be aggregated probability and this person's chances based on personal history may be much lower. Given CK does have access to personal history, one might easily get an impression that the prediction is a precise calculation based on it and thus imply more accuracy than warranted.

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#106
post #90
post #83

Things I think are worth noting: 1. Intuit owns Credit Karma > Intuit has lobbied extensively against the IRS providing taxpayers with free pre-filled forms, as is the norm in developed countries.[108][11][109] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit 2. Intuit owns Mailchimp. Mailchump was hacked earlier this year. > In a scant blog post dated August 12, just two days after the company’s co-founder and long-time CEO B…

Didn’t realize Intuit owned Mailchimp. It one online tool whose UX I hate with a passion. Mint comes close. What are some good alternatives to Mint for financial account aggregation?

You Need a Budget [ https://www.youneedabudget.com/ ] is one of the few online tools I pay money for. It connects to all the major credit cards, banks, loan companies, financial brokers, and most of the minor ones too. Its budgeting system actually makes sense.

You're only allowed to budget the money you have currently in your bank accounts and you're encouraged to daily categorize the previous days transactions so you immediately know if you're spending outside of your budget. I've referred a few friends and they all turned into paying customers.

I also have a referral link that gets me a free month: https://ynab.com/referral/?ref=sO-qTzrewvE6obDI

But they give you the free month regardless if you sign up on the main site. Just something nice to do if you try out the service and like it.

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#107
post #41

It’s a weird case IMO — CreditKarma played a role but it seems like all the actual harm was elsewhere. 1. The Criteria are given by the banks via 'Lightbox'. If they were misrepresenting those criteria, it seems like the harm was to the banks, but this isn't mentioned. And if they couldn’t express their criteria via lightbox and used it anyway… again it seems like that’s mostly on the banks. 2. I suspect these estima…

I never understood, they can get most of the data using a soft pull and pre approve, then why do a hard pull? Is it by law?

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#108
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still seems a bit dubious—-90% of people who view the ad being qualified doesn’t mean in any way that 90% of applicants will be successful. If you have more applicants from that bottom 10% pool who click on the ad to proceed, then it would be statistically very easy to end up with a reject rate much higher than 10%.

If you reject a third of applicants, the 90% figure is obviously misleading even if technically true in some sense.

It didn’t say 30% were rejected - it said on some offers as much as 30% were rejected. Again, the models can be totally accurate in aggregate but due to random variation or low sampling show as inaccurate on one specific offer, that is just how statistics work.

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#109
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t realize Intuit owned Mailchimp. It one online tool whose UX I hate with a passion. Mint comes close. What are some good alternatives to Mint for financial account aggregation?

You Need a Budget [ https://www.youneedabudget.com/ ] is one of the few online tools I pay money for. It connects to all the major credit cards, banks, loan companies, financial brokers, and most of the minor ones too. Its budgeting system actually makes sense. You're only allowed to budget the money you have currently in your bank accounts and you're encouraged to daily categorize the previous days transactions so y…

I use YNAB and like it for budgeting, but it is a very opinionated system. If you’re just looking for account aggregation and reporting, Personal Capital is probably better (US only, unfortunately).

Re: Credit Karma fined $3M by FTC for misleading consumers with credit card offers

#110
post #98
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antitrust is notoriously hard to prove. It often comes down to intent. Internal documents and how the company talks about business decisions can be enough to sway minds in a situation where you’re trying to convince a judge/jury what the company was thinking. Clearly if you’re trying to put a competitor out of business then calling it a “team room” won’t matter one bit.

Is this true? Given monopolistic consequences are structural and inevitable, it seems the law should be enforced on structure and function and not require deliberate intent.

Anti-trust isn’t black and white. The government encourage competition, but when you compete to become the only company, then it’s anti-trust.

The line is very fuzzy.

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