We are not their customers. Average Joe on the street is not their customer. No individual is their customer.[1]
Their customers are other businesses - mainly banks/credit card companies/lenders as well as background checking services. They have no reason to provide customer service to individuals in their database - they are required to provide minimum services by law.
[1] Actually, now some offer "credit monitoring services" to individuals, which are a cash hog because these services are absurdly overpriced and kinda scammy.
Exactly. We are not their customers. Employers and lenders are, no more, no less, simple as that.
Even “fraud protection” / “credit monitoring”, ostensibly the closest we come to being customers, is in many senses “protect you from our customers and our fuckups” (forgive the language).
This is a rich person service. Don't feel bad for them. What they're buying is someone else to watch their credit so they can go do whatever they want. The other customers are corporations that get hacked and then have to pay for credit monitoring.
Why should it be my responsibility to monitor their services in the first place? Even if you do get free credit monitoring it's just yet another technique to shift blame on to the customer
"Credit monitoring" is not limited to merely paying the surveillance companies themselves to give you a heads up if they're working on a new conspiracy against you. It is only within their own paradigm that the general concept of credit is subservient to their own databases.
My credit is self monitored. Any credit/contract taken out claiming association with my public identifiers (eg name, SSN, etc) but without legal notice to my longstanding address of record is prima facie invalid. So I review all of the junk mail that comes into my mailbox, which does cost actual time, primarily due to the negligent operations of these ambient-authority-demanding surveillance shitheads.
We are going about this the wrong way. We don't all need credit monitoring. It's just that the type of data they had is no longer secure and shouldn't be used to tie me to a transaction.
Just because someone has my SSN and my name doesn't mean they are me.
The problem is, as you articulated, they are required by law to provide credit reporting information about you to you. They have no incentive to do this because they make their money by collecting and selling data about us.
They have every reason to use this reporting requirement to collect more information about you.
They have every reason to conflate credit freeze with credit hold, and confuse consumers in order to extract regular payments from them.
They have zero reason to keep sensitive data about you secure. In fact, they have every reason to promote fear and uncertainty in the public that their sensitive personal information is in the hands of criminals as a growth opportunity for their industry to sell credit monitoring services.
They have successfully convinced the public that identity theft is a separate and distinct crime done exclusively by one person to another rather than simply fraud that they are aiding and abetting.
Consumers and credit reporting bureaus have a fundamentally adversarial relationship that no legislation can harmonize. They exist because they do serve a purpose for finance, which is to give an indication of how much money they can make lending money to someone. Regardless, this reporting does not have to be done by for-profit corporations. This can just as easily be done by non-profits or government agencies. Although these are not perfect, they are free of the perverse incentives driven by for profit corporate structures.
Finally someone who gets it. Credit monitoring/reporting services are a straight up fraudulent scam to get more of your personal information. I feel sorry for the suckers who actually pay for such things.
Honestly, not sure why people are surprised by this. The company is incompetent and not consumer or customer focused by any means.
Their entire operation is optimized to sell products and services to creditors, with no regard for actual consumers. They are a B2B company. They treat their employees poor, and their call center operations are outsourced to third party firms on a cost-basis whom are poorly trained and purely exist to field consumer contacts as required by law, but not actually resolve any issues.
I truly believe credit reporting agencies need to be heavily regulated and operated as a non-profit consumer institution, similar to the BBB.
Because they’re probably paying Marriot for the privilege of being listed as a provider for monitoring services. Once the free tier runs out they’ll try to milk the consumers for an ongoing protection charge.
> - Why is that not a service provided by a bank, as a part of having a credit card?
Separation of concerns. A bank or card issuer cares more about covering their own liability for fraud on a particular card. They don’t care if a new one gets issued in your name somewhere else or if a line of credit gets opened.
> - Why do individuals have to pay some random third parties to protect themselves from some fraudster defrauding some bank via data obtained from some company (even if, in publicized breach cases, this gets covered by breached company)?
That’s not strictly true. Freezing your credit across all the major credit agencies is free. They likely don’t want you to know or do that as it also limits junk mail for credit cards.
> - (Somewhat related) how is it that your "credit score" isn't just a number on your bank dashboard, but you have to pay third parties to discover it?
It can't be that all of this is just a legalized racket, can it? Because if feels like it is.
It is a racket with a private sector origin that effectively got standardized over the years. There’s a number of private organizations that provide “credit scores” with FICO being the most prominent.
Starting a few years ago most financial providers provide free access to your current score or some “fako” equivalent.
Stores need to stop offering "credit monitoring" as if it was some kind of solution. There should be liability with regards to personal information and credit cards.
These accounts aren’t for the people who pay Experian money. Companies pay Experian money to access information about individuals; the only reason Experian even allows accounts for individuals is because they are mandated by law to allow things like credit freezes and the annual credit report. If they weren’t required, they wouldn’t do it at all. They have zero incentive to improve the experience or the security of it.
How on Earth is having a credit-monitoring organization monitor my credit worth hundreds of dollars, when they're already doing it on behalf of credit companies anyway?
I agree fully, as the beneficiaries of the credit reporting services are banks/credit lending services. The customers, us, are the clients of this lender.
Moreover, why wouldn't it be opt-in? That's right, have the data be exchanged when loans are requested. How often do people apply for mortgages, credit cards and so forth? Definitely not 365 days of the year.
The reason these consumer credit monitoring services came into existence is interesting and, I assume, public knowledge, but I only learned about it when I worked for them.
Once upon a time governments in places with credit reference agencies (so particularly the UK and US for this story) noticed that this is a lot of power with not very much responsibility and they ought to fix that. So what they said was, you must let people see this data you know about them, for a small statutory fee. No option, that's what you have to do now if you want to stay in business.
This actually terrified the CRAs, because they imagined everybody is going to send off their fee, and it costs more for this enormous unwieldy corporation to respond than they're allowed to charge, so if everybody does this the company goes bankrupt.
But internally at Experian somebody says - Aha! The law doesn't require us to explain what the credit data means. So if you pay your fee you will get stuff that's incomprehsible to lay people not because we're deliberately obfuscating it, but because to us maybe "day 60 late ratio" has an obvious and very specific meaning but to a consumer it's noise. Obviously an expert could write a book about how to decode the statutory report, but we can instead offer a product that costs more than this fee but includes friendly explanations and translation. If we set the pricing right on this product, we make a profit while also warding off the statutory reports we dread.
And that project actually worked. As of ten years ago lots of people worried about their credit would cheerfully pay a CRA money to find out what the problem was. The division doing that grew enormously within Experian and other CRAs copied this idea.
In fact popular culture made things that didn't exist in one country (e.g. the numeric FICO score from the US) part of what consumers expected to learn in other countries, and so Experian UK actually has (or had when I worked for them) people who make up the formula for an arbitrary score number, even though creditors in the UK don't use this - so it's as meaningless as your Hacker News "karma" score.
Then somebody had another bright idea, what if we give this product which apparently people value, away for free, and then for a fee attach it to credit offers like new credit cards? We funnel card companies the exact customer profile they were looking for, they save acquisition costs, the customer gets the new credit they wanted, everybody is happy and we're richer. So that's what happens today.
Their customers are other businesses - mainly banks/credit card companies/lenders as well as background checking services. They have no reason to provide customer service to individuals in their database - they are required to provide minimum services by law.
[1] Actually, now some offer "credit monitoring services" to individuals, which are a cash hog because these services are absurdly overpriced and kinda scammy.
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