5 ms·

If you go to a bank to get a loan and they say "No, your credit sucks" telling them "I've never seen my credit report before" isn't going to change anything.

by harryh 7y ago

mindslight 7y ago
Of course, because being a passive consumer who only asks a counterparty for your options never changes anything. What you say is "I need a copy of the exact information you're basing this decision on", and inform the bank and its sources what statements are actually not true. If the bank defers to trusting the surveillance bureaus, and the surveillance bureaus refuse to recant the false statements, then you have a strong case for libel with actual damages on top of the procedural recourse in the industry-written laws.
- harryh 7y ago
  All of this is covered by the FCRA (fair credit reporting act). Yes, if there are mistakes in your credit report and you ask the CRA to correct them through designated channels they are obligated to fix things. However: 1) Whether you have previously seen your credit report or not is not relevant to this obligation. Most people will be better served by staying on top of things and getting errors corrected sooner rather than waiting to run into problems when applying for credit because: 2) Fixing things will take time. The CRAs are not obligated to act overnight, but instead on the order of 30 days or so. And depending on the exact nature of the errors, this can involve several sequential 30 day round trips. If you need a loan to, say, buy a house right now that's gonna be a bummer for you. 3) In the end, if the CRAs don't follow the rules it's not actually a problem of libel for them. They're much more likely to have a problem with their regulator than to be concerned with a private lawsuit. AFAIK no one has ever successfully sued a CRA for libel. People have tried and failed though. Frankly if you threaten to sue for libel you will not be presenting as professional[A] and you will hinder your cause. A. See https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-reports/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...
- tptacek 7y ago
  Are you saying you'd have a strong case for libel because you have empirical data to back that up, or are you saying it because you think axiomatically that you should have a strong case?
  - mindslight 7y ago
    Not 'axiomatically', rather just naively from basic legal principles. In the same way that one would expect many police shootings to be prosecuted as voluntary manslaughter.
- patio11 7y ago
  I am not a lawyer, but I likely have had more at-bats with the credit reporting agencies and financial institutions on this and related issues than almost all lawyers and, I mean this literally, every other person on HN. I think you will, if you consult an attorney, be advised that you are unlikely to prevail in your cause of action under a libel theory. Your lawyer is likely going to point to the pre-emption parts of FCRA, specifically 15 U.S.C. § 1681h(e) and 15 U.S.C. § 1681t(b). The general tenor of this conversation is going to be "When Congress wanted to regulate the credit reporting industries, they and interested parties made a trade: a very consumer-friendly state machine and freedom to operate the state machine. Part-and-parcel to this trade was radically reducing legal risks to the financial industry and CRAs outside of the state machine. If you're going to claim that Congress didn't want to pre-empt state laws, you're going to be walking uphill against legislative history, the plain text of the statute, and every canon of statutory construction." Separate from the legal issue, I think HNers might be surprised to learn that the state machine pretty routinely achieves the objectives. A determined, literate, and well-organized person will routinely achieve the outcome they desire from it, even with the other side of process being the largest lenders in America. This is a surprising result in consumer lending when reasoning from first principles ("Shouldn't Bank of America's legal team always or approximately always crush a Kansan grandmother?") but I believe, from a few hundred at-bats, it to be true.
  - mindslight 7y ago
    I know of your personal experience, and thank you for your response. I actually hadn't realized that the surveillance bureaus had regulatory-captured general legal immunity so openly. So yes, I was overstating the legal situation thinking they would be better on the hook for libel. Frankly this overbearing immunity should be a talking point of every "identity theft" article, but unfortunately those articles are written from a perspective that is still wed to the primacy of this system. > I think HNers might be surprised to learn that the state machine pretty routinely achieves the objectives None of these stories really focus on irreversible damages (besides eg SIM swapping stealing cryptocurrency), but rather the time taken dealing with that "state machine". Diligently checking your own dossier is doing the surveillance bureau's work for them - adding to this perverse incentive where they don't bother doing the diligence of verifying loan applicants hoping that consumers will be responsible for guarding use of public identifiers associated with them. A quick reading of the FCRA still doesn't show any statutory timeline within which surveillance subjects ("consumers") are required to verify the dossiers on themselves - compared to say regulation E which requires that you verify your legitimate account ledgers at least every month and a half (please correct me if I missed something). I'm not the type to be continually applying for new credit cards for whatever incentive they're offering, so dealing with any backscatter from identity fraud is purely a cost to me. The less I involve myself with their system, the more I can handle its involuntarily burden in "batch mode".

If you go to a bank to get a loan and they say "No, your credit sucks" telling them "I've never seen my credit report before" isn't going to change anything.

by harryh 7y ago

If you go to a bank to get a loan and they say "No, your credit sucks" telling them "I've never seen my credit report before" isn't going to change anything.

mindslight 7y ago

Of course, because being a passive consumer who only asks a counterparty for your options never changes anything. What you say is "I need a copy of the exact information you're basing this decision on", and inform the bank and its sources what statements are actually not true. If the bank defers to trusting the surveillance bureaus, and the surveillance bureaus refuse to recant the false statements, then you have a strong case for libel with actual damages on top of the procedural recourse in the industry-written laws.

harryh 7y ago
All of this is covered by the FCRA (fair credit reporting act). Yes, if there are mistakes in your credit report and you ask the CRA to correct them through designated channels they are obligated to fix things. However: 1) Whether you have previously seen your credit report or not is not relevant to this obligation. Most people will be better served by staying on top of things and getting errors corrected sooner rather than waiting to run into problems when applying for credit because: 2) Fixing things will take time. The CRAs are not obligated to act overnight, but instead on the order of 30 days or so. And depending on the exact nature of the errors, this can involve several sequential 30 day round trips. If you need a loan to, say, buy a house right now that's gonna be a bummer for you. 3) In the end, if the CRAs don't follow the rules it's not actually a problem of libel for them. They're much more likely to have a problem with their regulator than to be concerned with a private lawsuit. AFAIK no one has ever successfully sued a CRA for libel. People have tried and failed though. Frankly if you threaten to sue for libel you will not be presenting as professional[A] and you will hinder your cause. A. See https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-reports/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...
tptacek 7y ago
Are you saying you'd have a strong case for libel because you have empirical data to back that up, or are you saying it because you think axiomatically that you should have a strong case?
- mindslight 7y ago
  Not 'axiomatically', rather just naively from basic legal principles. In the same way that one would expect many police shootings to be prosecuted as voluntary manslaughter.
patio11 7y ago
I am not a lawyer, but I likely have had more at-bats with the credit reporting agencies and financial institutions on this and related issues than almost all lawyers and, I mean this literally, every other person on HN. I think you will, if you consult an attorney, be advised that you are unlikely to prevail in your cause of action under a libel theory. Your lawyer is likely going to point to the pre-emption parts of FCRA, specifically 15 U.S.C. § 1681h(e) and 15 U.S.C. § 1681t(b). The general tenor of this conversation is going to be "When Congress wanted to regulate the credit reporting industries, they and interested parties made a trade: a very consumer-friendly state machine and freedom to operate the state machine. Part-and-parcel to this trade was radically reducing legal risks to the financial industry and CRAs outside of the state machine. If you're going to claim that Congress didn't want to pre-empt state laws, you're going to be walking uphill against legislative history, the plain text of the statute, and every canon of statutory construction." Separate from the legal issue, I think HNers might be surprised to learn that the state machine pretty routinely achieves the objectives. A determined, literate, and well-organized person will routinely achieve the outcome they desire from it, even with the other side of process being the largest lenders in America. This is a surprising result in consumer lending when reasoning from first principles ("Shouldn't Bank of America's legal team always or approximately always crush a Kansan grandmother?") but I believe, from a few hundred at-bats, it to be true.
- mindslight 7y ago
  I know of your personal experience, and thank you for your response. I actually hadn't realized that the surveillance bureaus had regulatory-captured general legal immunity so openly. So yes, I was overstating the legal situation thinking they would be better on the hook for libel. Frankly this overbearing immunity should be a talking point of every "identity theft" article, but unfortunately those articles are written from a perspective that is still wed to the primacy of this system. > I think HNers might be surprised to learn that the state machine pretty routinely achieves the objectives None of these stories really focus on irreversible damages (besides eg SIM swapping stealing cryptocurrency), but rather the time taken dealing with that "state machine". Diligently checking your own dossier is doing the surveillance bureau's work for them - adding to this perverse incentive where they don't bother doing the diligence of verifying loan applicants hoping that consumers will be responsible for guarding use of public identifiers associated with them. A quick reading of the FCRA still doesn't show any statutory timeline within which surveillance subjects ("consumers") are required to verify the dossiers on themselves - compared to say regulation E which requires that you verify your legitimate account ledgers at least every month and a half (please correct me if I missed something). I'm not the type to be continually applying for new credit cards for whatever incentive they're offering, so dealing with any backscatter from identity fraud is purely a cost to me. The less I involve myself with their system, the more I can handle its involuntarily burden in "batch mode".