CRAs serve no good purpose. Their databases should be destroyed.

Brock_and_Roll

agarnett wrote: »

Died in the wool bank staff.

Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do half the time, and could care less the other half.


Anyway, back to the main theme of the uselessness and dangers inherent in propounding the UK's love affair with CRAs:

Today my internet-less aged parents received an Experian Alert via email.

If they knew what email was all about AND they knew how to view it on their mobile phone then of course we couldn't say they were strictly internet-less could we? However, it is generally accepted that less than 1/3rd of those age 75+ are connected at home.

OK so the rest of our most senior citizens may be clueless with regard to the technological revolutions of the last two decades, other than one or two medical ones of course! They are clueless to common trickery devised in the last two decades to take advantage of the technological revolutions which into which they have been involuntarily sucked. So they know about being wary of strangers knocking at the door, but they are unaware that businesses like Thrugelmir's take shortcuts with "know your customer" and in fact couldn't give a toss who is buying their cheap trousers on appo from a classified ad in the Daily Express because as a "business" (any old business will do) they have purchased the power from a CRA to play God, dreamed up a non-existent credit agreement that fits the CRA's definition of "mail order credit" even though no-one asked for credit, and hey presto, they gaily and daily slap black marks over pensioners credit files for those who are a bit slow on the uptake.

Of course many of the smart Alecs on these forums smirk at the ridiculousness of those who are not connected or whose hands are not being held by dominant offspring towards financial and technological righteousness.

To them I say, you should be ashamed, both at your blinkered, and at your unkind view of those who share our pale blue dot.

88% of pensioners in the UK record their religious affiliation as Christian. 8% are recorded as of no religion. Can we please be a bit more Christian in outlook when considering their plight such that they might maintain their faith in human kindness at least? Many come to this particular forum complain about CRAs, but most of the elderly cannot. The treatment some of our senior citizens receive at the hands of CRAs and profiteers goes endured silently and despairingly. This must stop.


So what was this credit file alert my parents received from Experian today which they were being urged to log in and check out?

Turns out it was the credit search by the bank ten days ago ... remember that? The one that resulted in the bank saying no new debit card, you'll have to subscribe to Experian, Equifax or Callcredit to find out why?

And what did we do? Yep we immediately set about subscribing and the Experian account was set up 9 days ago. I activated it on 31st with the PIN code and saw everything including the bank search and two by Experian itself. And they know we logged in and saw it.

But today we needed to urgently log in to see what they know we already saw?

Useless bloody "service" - for a potential £14.99 per month before I knock it on the head out of its misery, you'd have thought something a bit more instant was proper. Afterall, they give instant access to our personal data to any other party who pays ...

Nope, the UK CRA system is a big wrong. It doesn't have to be this way. Those who blandly say it does without making any suggestion for reform whatsoever are very obviously blinkered. With some horses blinkers are necessary to keep them focused on winning the race. With the best good natured favorites not so edgy with the world and jumpy in their own skin, blinkers aren't necessary either for high performance, or for being safely presented to owners and punters in the paddock.

Yep - tinfoil hat confirmed!

agarnett

Brock_and_Roll wrote: »

Yep - tinfoil hat confirmed!

Are you at all capable of explaining what is meant by a tin foil hat and how you can then safely apply the expression to sum up my statements, or did you just pick it up as a bit of internet slang that you can sprinkle around hopefully in the hope that some otherwise uninformed readers might consider you know something of the correct use of English?

AndyBSG

Brock_and_Roll wrote: »

Yep - tinfoil hat confirmed!

You only have to look at his posting history to see this guy is away with the fairies and firmly in the 'conspiracy theory' camp

Lungboy

I know nothing about credit ratings really, but would the US system where the credit score is actually meaningful be more useful to the general public? It's scary how many people actually think their UK credit score is worth something.

roger10

i disagree with you that it serves no purpose but there is certainly a big problem with their frequency of update and the list of people such as your parents. i think this primarily because your parents serve no purpose to their ability to make money especially that all they need is a basic account. also CRAs are at risk of mishandling such vulnerable people and i know this because like you i use to work within the industry who uses CRA data quite a lot.

judging by your parents situation i believe they should be in the database by virtue of electoral list then you go on the utilities etc. and if that all fails it puts a big question/s on how they onboard people surely they must be in one of the list and this is why i think they filter people by virtue of profits. who can blame them they are after all a business but if they are the basis of financial judgement or even proving their existence then surely the government should regulate these companies a lot better and more to the point who they've been selling our data and if i ask my information to be corrected are they in a position to update who they gave your details to which gives me to the second point of frequency of update.

late last year i asked for a business account from my current account provider and i was refused on the basis that i am not in the electoral roll. i moved in in my new house in sept 14 and updated the council in oct 14. i applied for my business account on dec 15 by end of jan i was refused due to insufficient data and when i requested for data at experian i wasn't in the electoral roll and i paid for the £15 service. and i sat there to be told by an experian agent that they don't usually get it right in effect and that we have the right to correct them. to some degree i agree they will not get it right all the time especially with balances but with electoral roll that is purely unforgivable.

anyway sign up to NODDLE it's a free service and it has all the necessary info you need maybe not for your parents benefit but to everyone in the forum.

agarnett

AndyBSG wrote: »

You only have to look at his posting history to see this guy is away with the fairies and firmly in the 'conspiracy theory' camp

What on earth has any of this to do with conspiracy theory? Do some of you posters just come here to demonstrate you've heard a few long words and can spell some of them? Are you looking for love on that basis? Get out more.

Lungboy and Roger, thanks for adding sensibly to the debate.

My parent's Experian credit report is literally just a single page with more text in the header and footer than in the report.

It does indeed show an uninterrupted Electoral record of 35 years going back to that magic year 1980 which Microsoft used to call the year dot!

Apart from that there is one closed and normally settled mail order account listed, and the one rogue one I have already mentioned. The average age of both credit accounts is 8 months which is a negative credit score factor according to Experian. An additional negative factor (there were four contrived nonsensical ones in all but I have forgotten the other two) was that there was no closed settled revolving credit account whatever that means.

There are no entries by utility companies or their landline telephone provider. I am not sure we would normally expect those anyway? I mean why would they need to give CRA's any data if they get paid on time everytime for donkey's years?

So the first credit report I got from Experian 10 days ago gave a score (sic) of the low 700s but within 5 days it had increased to above 750 - and do we wanna know why, people? It is because lo and behold the first mail order company from whom she probably bought one item around Christmas had decided that the £400 limit revolving credit facility they accounted in her name and which (which my Mum hadn't even realised she'd entered into because she had paid for her purchase costing £10 quite normally by mailed cheque) had been closed as no further purchase had been made! Bingo. CRA plus points!

That £400 limit by the way started before Christmas as a £200 limit when she only spent ten quid. The mail order company then doubled the limit before closing it when it was never used. It is a disgraceful silly game played with personal data and stupidly cheap chips placed in the game by businesses who aren't viable without the fear of their power to "mess you up good" if you dare to cross them. It is a form of threatened violence no more acceptable than the offence of common assault which is practiced daily by these firms who thrive on anonymous impersonal low quantum business with hundreds of thousands of those who have limited ability to get out to the high streets and shopping malls (and have no internet like 68% of the over 75s).


Roger, you mention Noddle. Noddle is indeed very easy to sign up to (if you have a valid card registered to your address at this moment - you've read the story so you will recall that my parents of course do not ... that's exactly what the cr¤ppy CRA records have thus far denied them!). You will not have missed that Noddle are of course CallCredit in a rebranded guise! Once upon a time CallCredit were so easy to open an account with online to get an instant download of a full credit report that it was a Doddle for a criminal to sign up pretending they were me, and I suspect pretending to be hundreds of others, judged by the fact I didn't have to look beyond the end of my street to find another poor soul who had been hit the same way at the same time!


Update: I have spoken to a very sympathetic lady today at JD Williams Group who are the company responsible for BOTH (the only two) credit account records on my parents' file. Their MO is simple mail order ads for one off products in the tabloid press. Clearly my mother has applied to two separate ads which she thought were two separate companies but turns out they are the same group and probably therefore quite big and ugly in the mail order world!

I thought it was a sole trader because the entry said JD WILLIAMS TA FIFTY PLUS. I think that's wrong of course because that entry does not define any exact entity which has to be a limited company if it is part of a group. Their call centre staff are however human and kind - the lady said she'd do her best and volunteered an end of day call back to tell me how she got on - but when she called she was most apologetic because unfortunately she personally and the CRA team she'd spoken to were powerless to do anything. She'd been told all that could be done was for my mother to write to request an investigation which may or may not be settled in their favour, and the bad entries removed or not.

No-one was willing to take a view even though they already have all the information under their noses, the so-called credit account was opened only 7 months ago and for the last four months the account has been settled with zero balance.


It really is wild that the UK CRA system is as mutant as this, isn't it? In my parents' case it is being used for one purpose only - for JD WILLIAMS Group to store their petty payment record on two credit agreements they have opened without my parents' proper consent. If we ask my parents if they have applied for any credit in the past year and they would say 'What do you mean? Of course not!'

So my parents have gone from hero (they earned invited Platinum status decades ago) to zero at their bank purely on the strength of this silly entry when absolutely no other entity has ever put any mark or search on their file other than the search when my mother asked for a card 10 days ago!

I think actually this example above all others I have ever seen illustrates the total uselessness, the difficulties experienced by data subjects in ensuring proper husbandry of relevant data and unacceptable dangers and misuse and abuse inherent in the UK CRA and credit licensing system generally.

takman

agarnett - But i think you are looking at this completely the wrong way. Your parents have opened two credit accounts without knowing what they were doing and then ended up paying one 3 months late even though it only had a balance of £14.99. So i think this information needs to be recorded otherwise they could end up signing up for other credit accounts without understanding them which could lead to financial difficulties. Even if they didn't understand they were credit accounts they must have realized that they have received goods and not paid for them, and that paying 3 months after you receive something is definitely not normal considering that you usually pay for things before you receive them.

You talk about your parents as if they are children and don't understand anything that you explain to them. All you need to tell them was that they ordered goods and they sent them before they paid so this means that it is a credit account. Then they were 3 month late paying this account which now gives them a bad record. They can then use this information to be more careful in the future.

agarnett

You have defined a credit account to suit your own argument, takman.

My parents don't ever want to buy something and pay later. The closest their understanding might be to what they were getting into is that they might have been offered to buy something "on appo" to use an old-fashioned term.

They did not willingly or knowingly enter into a credit agreement.

I haven't looked into the exact seller plot and purchase saga and JD Williams of course can't tell me unless I go to the trouble of getting a written authorisation from my parents. I have not done that because it frankly is a waste of their lives to worry about.

Yes, many of the elderly do become childlike, but that does not give anyone the right to deny them their right to continue to make decisions for themselves if that is what they wish to do. When senior citizens cease to lead families but become more treasured and protected, we naturally do not wish them to share all the worries. If you or I has to worry about something we have not understood, we have to research it from scratch perhaps if it is not something within our experience. Older people often don't desire that hassle. I've already said in respect of my parents:

1. Full lives lived without any credit other than a single mortgage long paid off
2. Lived without ever using an ATM and all purchases by cash or cheque or DD
3. Lived without ever using or wanting to use the internet

They are not unique for their generation. You might be from a long line of clerical and administrative types. I am from a long line of manual labourers which of course is where most ancestral lines in the UK quickly lead back.

You are here on the internet. You think you understand the world and are well equipped for it and isn't everyone? Well actually, No. Most are not, but especially senior citizens without any computer experience or need for it other than the sort of need you might foist upon them.

We don't shepherd them all into care and run their lives for them, but we do shield them from daily worries about new systems which may endanger them if we can. We do not expose them to things that we know might easily be misunderstood and contain obvious pitfalls. And we don't constantly keep warning them that more and more of these things are out there ready to catch them out either. Life is about far more than being wary of going out or second-guessing the motives of a company selling a pair of trousers in the newspaper.

So we protect senior citizens' independence as long as we can in kind ways. We don't mollycoddle, and we do act caringly and kindly as opposed to carelessly. And that means business must act in the same way.

That position only changes if the proper authority decides that seniors' affairs must be taken out of their hands for their own good. The proper authority is not you, or any other man on the internet of course, and it does not actually end that way for all senior citizens.

Meantime then, financial institutions have a problem. Yes, we as the offspring owe such seniors an extra duty of care in facilitating their independence as long as possible, but so do the financial institutions that choose to do business with them and reap the benefit for 60 years and then too easily spit them out as too risky and too difficult to deal with directly. As I say, it is just as much a problem to be owned by the corporates as it is to the customer.

My parents have never in their aggregate 185 years of life ever need to know what a credit agreement is. And you are urging that they need to be told now because ... why was it again? Because they might inadvertently find themselves tied up in one with an arbitrary limit of £200 increased to £400 if they should buy a pair of cheap trousers from a tabloid classified? No Sir. They do not need to learn this.

What JD Williams needs to learn is that it is misselling credit to vulnerable types who never asked for it, and what CRAs need to learn (but they never learn) is that they are aiding and abetting the misselling and the recording of false personal data that inevitably results when you affirm that you have sold a £200 credit agreement when in fact all you,ve sold is a £14.99 pair of trousers.

You takman, are currently blinkered like so many others. My parents have no credit problems and never have had any credit problems. They are whiter than white in every regard. Where they do have problems is where several parties are false accounting non-existent agreements and those other parties have not yet accepted that they are doing anything wrong.

If you wish to comment credibly about how business should be done with the growing and significant population of senior citizens, I suggest you need to break out of how you think you yourself can reasonably handle the typical edgy business plays of the 21st Century, and consider properly how our senior citizens wish to be treated more kindly. Because in the main, that is the world they have been part of in peacetime all their lives, not the one you and so many others prematurely and carelessly present as normal with your limited experience of life.

As I say, you have leapt to the conclusion that my parents are factual bad-payers on the flimsiest of information: You are relying on the say so of a multiple face mail order company that aims itself deliberately at a vulnerable and gullible market who buy low value purchase from tabloid classifieds and have no desire whatsoever to enter into high value credit agreements, and the say so of a CRA which does not check the facts from such a data provider before it publishes a nasty story about an individual. You are perhaps the living proff of why CRA databases should be destroyed - so people like you cannot make the completely wrong judgements that you so carelessly have leapt to.

Who do you think my parents are? Maybe
(a) chancers?
(b) misers who pay everything on the red one?
(c) constantly in financial difficulty?
(d) unwise?
(e) unkind?
(f) unintelligent?
(g) untrustworthy?
(h) uncreditworthy?
(i) undeserving of the highest and most attentive service their bank can offer?

You'd be completely wrong on all counts and in addition, the reason why they have been recorded as having paid late is not actually established. I can in fact remember taking something to be returned that could have been a pair of jeans to the post office for my mother a few months ago. I haven't asked her yet, but there is a chance that she returned that pair of trousers as they didn't fit! I am also certain that my mother has bought many more than two items from such newspaper advertisements over the years. So why are there just the two recent accounts (average 8 months old) on the credit report? My guess is that the CRA's did not previously allow the mail order companies to record information like this, but in recent times they have. You must surely realise that the extent of CRA data that is commonly held on us all has burgeoned ridiculously in the last five years. It is out of control.

If you still think your world view is right and mine wrong, then I must first tell you that the view of it you propound is not the only thing that is wrong, your world also stinks. Try sweeten it up a bit.

27col

OP. You don't seriously believe that a database run by the Government is any more likely to be accurate, than the existing commercially run databases. Do you?
The only thing that I can agree with you about, is my resistance to companies that give you a credit account just because you have bought on item from them. They have a damn cheek. If I wanted a credit account with them I would ask for one. It has happened twice recently.

DandelionPatrol

takman wrote: »

agarnett - You are ranting and raving at how useless CRA are and how their information is rubbish and that they are useless. But from what you are saying it sounds like all the information they have on your parents is actually correct. They have obviously bought something from an advert and paid late and that is their own fault.

While I agree that AG is having a bit of a rant, it is IMO to a fair extent quite justifiable

takman wrote: »

agarnett - But i think you are looking at this completely the wrong way. Your parents have opened two credit accounts without knowing what they were doing and then ended up paying one 3 months late even though it only had a balance of £14.99. So i think this information needs to be recorded otherwise they could end up signing up for other credit accounts without understanding them which could lead to financial difficulties. Even if they didn't understand they were credit accounts they must have realized that they have received goods and not paid for them, and that paying 3 months after you receive something is definitely not normal considering that you usually pay for things before you receive them.

I am thinking that it is you who are looking this the wrong way. Granted, OP is not presenting the story very coherently, but it looks to me like his parents were victims of a modern business process which can only handle purchases by creating credit accounts.

Quite why the trousers did not get paid for is not clear, perhaps AG would clarify, but equally, if we take his testimony about his parents at face value, they did not set out to deceive.

Perhaps if the purchase was a straight purchase to be paid on receipt of goods, they expected the bill to fall out of the parcel? Perhaps the bill was a credit account bill and they did not pay it because it did not register with them as being anything to do with the trousers? Perhaps they did not even realise they had signed up to a credit account?

Whatever is the reason for this, although the information in the credit record about the £14.99 may in strict terms be true, I would have to ask whether it has any real value whatsoever for a bank who have known this couple as customers for 60 years.

Time and again on these forums we see people who are caught out by trivial issues - often not entirely of their own making - when the affected people do not truly represent a credit risk and when the rejecting organisation will take petty information from outside and give it more credence that their own records.