Equifax wiped out his credit score — and a little-known policy means he can't get it back
Equifax wiped out his credit score — and a little-known policy means he can't get it back
Equifax refused to restore his credit score or explain why it dropped to zero, until Go Public started asking questions.
Only then did the company point to its little-known policy: If a credit file sits inactive, the consumer may be labelled "unscoreable" and their score reset to zero. Tregear says the last time he checked, before it disappeared, his score was around a more respectable 700.
Go Public has since found a major flaw in consumer protection rules — that there are no laws or oversight on how credit scores are calculated, leaving credit bureaus to do what they want.
Consumer advocate Geoff White says that gives credit bureaus too much power, with no transparency.
It is kinda funny how often people will give shit to China for it's social credit score but we're not too fucking far off from it here in the west. When you can't even get housing because of a credit score... it's kind of a fuckin' problem.
Except ours is based on our ability to repay debt. Which is fucked.
Not saying China's is any better, but at least you're rated on your actions and words. Not some capitalist view of a person's worth.
Both are fucked.
Anyway, credit scores should be abolished.
That’s an interesting concept but standards are different, so what does a social score mean anyway? For example, I value high eq/empathy above all. Lacking that but being a billionaire won’t increase my score toward you even though you might be rated high because you own a house, car, business etc.
TL;DR: how could you ever trust anyone to define a social credit score based on actions/words? And how can you offer debt without having something like a (better implemented) credit score?
I think I understand where you are coming from, assigning people a “worth” based on something financial is messed up. Ideally there would be some way to instead reward people for good things like being polite to people, and not littering. And possibly to penalize people for engaging in bad behaviour.
But even if I trusted the current government to implement this with the right goals, I would never trust future governments not to abuse this system. I don’t think I’d really trust any sort of group to do this right. I’m already disappointed enough with our current democracy (in Canada) for not getting rid of first-pass-the-post, and I’m skeptical that much will change with interprovincial trade barriers (why not sooner?).
But the idea of a better implemented credit score to track only severe abuse of debt doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to me. Obviously the current system is messed up and has major problems, but I feel like it could plausibly be fixed and done in a reasonable way. I think debt to buy a house (and maybe sometimes a car) is generally a good option to have. And I don’t know how you could offer this without tracking people who don’t pay. (Though maybe I’m wrong, maybe just going based off of income history is enough.)
But yes, the current system is ridiculous. People should be rewarded for never needing debt, not disqualified from getting future debt without notice. And it should be much easier to track and fix problems on our credit score. And things like cell phone bills don’t seem worth being affiliated with credit bureaus. I think most people would be better suited to prepaid plans if they were options. And I feel like financing phones is a really bad thing, people don’t realize how expensive they are. I’d rather if all my utility bills just collected some deposit instead of potentially being able to ruin my credit if a bill gets lost in the mail after I moved out. (But this could be too expensive for a lot of people, so again the credit score seems to have a purpose).
How so? It seems to be exactly what lenders want to know before lending. Are you judging a system by its exceptions?
Don't forget the even more nebulous and secretive insurance scores that are even tied in to data brokers!
On the other hand, the Chinese "social credit" is mostly western fabulation. And what little implementation of that actually does exists is actually mostly used to track and punish corporations and governmental bodies.... So there's that.
Ah, so eastern social credit is the public(ish) policing private business. And that is very bad -- by which of course I mean it's targeting the people who most manipulate western public opinion.
But our western financial credit is private business policing the general public. "This is normal."