I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

I sent a driving licence and redacted the licence number, then overtyped the whole thing with the text in my previous post.

My goal was to make certain that if it leaked, the overtyped expiry date should make it useless after a certain point, and the company name should make any company other than that one question the source.

As a side effect, it'd also clearly identify the source of any leaks - but that wasn't my primary goal.

I moved the text so the name and address (which they already had) and date of birth (which isn't really a secret) were clearly readable.

If all this data would be more or less random (which is kind of implied by "run on bots worldwide in millions") this would merely add some random noise to large datasets. For this to create any real problems the noise generated by those bots would have to be somehow biased, of course in an incorrect way. This implies then, that for such idea to be even remotely effective one would need at least a peak in aggregated data to know real trends and program bots to blur the image generating fake trends.

The impetus for a company like Sift was better fraud detection. I haven't evaluated the platform in some time, but if I remember correctly; it democratized the fraud decision process by feeding Sift data on successful orders. Clients would score their own orders based on whether or not it was returned, charged back or simply a successful no-friction order.

Something like 80% of customers have issued a chargeback, 86% of chargebacks are "friendly fraud", increasing at a rate of 41% every two years. The dollar figure I've heard is $20+ Billion in friendly fraud.

So, obviously there's an altruistic nature to why a company like Sift has this data. But, I'm of the opinion that they saw the dollar value in this type of scoring and collection system.

Credit reference agencies are already prone to false data, and that's without anyone trying to game them.

When I checked this year, 2 out of the 3 major CRAs in my country (Equifax, Experian) had:

- An incorrect flag saying I was not registered to vote, and a note saying this significantly affected my credit rating.

- A bogus address that didn't correspond to any physical location. Nor did it correspond with any address used by any business, that I know of. (If it does, they won't be able to mail me!)

- Three credit application searches (hard searches) in 3 days, for applications I didn't make. (I complained to the relevant company, who agreed they were added due to software errors on their side, and "resolved" the complaint by agreeing to remove them; but in the end they didn't remove them, so my history has unremovable entries for applications I've never made.)

- An account with the largest telecoms provider (BT) in the country that I didn't have (I'd left them 2 years earlier, account fully closed and settled).

- Fictitious monthly entries on the above account showing new amounts being added each month, of seemingly random amounts (no obvious pattern), and flagged as severe, overdue, late payer etc. Not a good look on a credit record, and entirely fictitious. (Fixing this proved arduous, and I ended up having to use three companies in a daisy-chain of each one passing along a formal complaint to the next. I later learned from BT customer support that BT does this to other former customers without their knowledge as well, so for ethical reasons if I can muster the energy I'll be complaining about this to the government regulator)

I could say so much more about the complaints process, terrible customer service in every conceivable way from Equifax specifically, and more, but it would be rather off-topic.

Remarkably, just complaining about the above caused the errors to be acknowledged and correct data found magically by the companies involved, without me needing to provide replacement data. It's as if the companies involved had all the data they needed already, they just aren't using it until a customer finds out and complains.