Big Brother Has Arrived (not talking about the TV show!)

witches_cauldron · 16 September 2008 at 2:10PM

2. How Does Hunter Work?

Applications received by the company are entered into their own databases and the application data is passed or transmitted to MCL. They cross-match it against other application and fraud data, including CIFAS according to which Hunter scheme, the company participates in. If it is the most widely used National Hunter, any matches are reported back to the National Hunter members to investigate. National Hunter matches are decided by a set of rules as to what is a match and what is not.

Example: A mortgage application is made to a National Bank. It matches against 6 applications to other mortgage lenders and against 3 applications for credit cards. The matches are reported back to the Bank and the data is stored on its internal Hunter system. The Bank investigates the matches, and sees the matching application data in full through the system. They then decide the mortgage application is fraudulent and place an indicator on their Hunter systems that is transmitted to the National Hunter database at MCL to indicate the application is a fraud. No-one will then do any business with that customer.

If National Bank decide the application is just suspicious rather than fraudulent, they place a suspicious indicator on their Hunter database.

These indicators are stored by the individual company Hunter system, the Group Hunter system, by the other companies on their Hunter or Group Hunter systems and by MCL. If a mistake is made, how can the individual ever know all the records have been corrected? Never.

The fraud data is kept for 6 years or more and stops individuals ever getting a mortgage during that time. Other fraud data (including mortgages) in the industry is discarded earlier than this. Why is Hunter fraud data treated differently? The Data Protection Commissioner lets them get away with this.

Data is stored on so many parts of Hunter by some many companies on different databases, that when a mistake is made and later corrected, how can a customer have any confidence the data has been removed from every database?

When a mistake is made, one fraud database may be corrected, but there are no procedures to ensure all the others are. Hunter, CIFAS, and any others should be required to ensure this is the case.

The Chairman of Hunter is a woman from Nationwide Building Society. The Hunter Association is not a limited company so you can take her to court personally if you find something wrong with the data. Only when someone does so will this system become transparent to consumers. Others on the Association management committee are from Britannia Building Society, Northern Rock, Grabbey National, Barclays, and so on.