Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian all offer account freezing for free. Take advantage of it! It is a great way to prevent someone from wrecking your credit
Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian all offer account freezing for free. Take advantage of it! It is a great way to prevent someone from wrecking your credit
Does it seem unethical to anyone else that Experian reports credit scores and also has a service to boost your credit score? Like “pay us or else we’ll tell people you’re poor.”
I mean, the whole idea of credit scores in general is just a scam to keep poor people poor (and more specifically - in debt), and to create work for a new kind of companies - those standing between us and our “score” (which isn’t even measured consistently, but changes from agency to agency) and who we have to provide with access to our most personal and sensitive data to access (which they then sell on to add to their record profits).
It was an easier and quicker way to vet people for likelihood of paying money back. When it came to be, back in the 80’s, there was no good way to find out if a guy asking for a loan from a bank was likely to pay back a loan from the bank, so you have to already own valuable things like cars and houses and appraised art pieces and such that you could show the bank you owned that could be taken as collateral in exchange for the loan.
So I disagree with your premise, because even pre-credit you had to have a wealthy set of assets before you could get money on credit. At least now you can just show that you’ve kept up with paying bills and what-not in the reflection of your credit score. When I was in my early 20’s (like 20 years ago) all I owned was a $3,000 car and a crappy job, but I paid all my stuff on time every time and my credit scores were all over 750.
Yes and it was also unethical for them to be allowed to simply give you a year of this shitty service for free as compensation for allowing hackers to access all of our personal information.
Guaranteed all that data is still being sold and resold over and over again. Who even knows how many people have everyone’s info at this point and they didn’t even get a slap on the wrist, nor has anything been done to unlink our financial security from our SSN. It’s disgusting.
It’s also just for Experian, and not all lenders take it into account. If your lender prefers to use Transunion for example, then it doesn’t mean shit.
Source: I had a 750+ score according to Experian with boost, but Transunion had me at blank due to using a debit card only for 15 years and paying off all my debt. Chase wouldn’t give me a card because they only wanted to pull from Transunion, and they didn’t give a crap about Experian.