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

agarnett

DandelionPatrol wrote: »

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.

Thanks for confirming your understanding of the position as well as I myself understand it at the moment.

I agree it will be interesting from a curiosity viewpoint at least, to understand exactly the course of events or non-events leading to the first recording of the alleged late payment event at the CRA.

At this stage you may have noticed that I am curious about whether the item I posted in the post office via a pre-printed label returns system a few months ago was in fact the item in question.

If it was, then it would appear that my parents nevertheless paid for it at some point. I am a little uneasy about it because I cannot see how they paid for it. I have checked this evening and have found no cheque payment for that amount or anything remotely similar or relevant in their bank records.

I can scarcely imagine my parents would
(a) post cash
(b) bother about getting a postal order to use to pay
(c) fail to us a cheque if a cheque was acceptable.

I can confirm that there is no stray DD or STO or Card transaction either.

Curioser and curioser isn't it?

Does anyone know if JD Williams actually accept cheques?


Whether they do or not, I am wondering if JD Williams returns system might be up the creek, but I will have to gently interrogate my parents in order to find out if they still have the purchase or whether they returned it.

The fact remains, this silly wild goose chase is only made necessary because a major bank has tripped over a single extremely trivial piece of questionable mail order company data held on a CRA file, and their "process" requires that they should now treat my parents as a serious credit risk irrespective of what their own systems have been telling them continuously for 60 years! So they are currently refusing to disregard it.

PaulW922

dfub wrote: »

Sort of off topic I suppose so sorry for that but *in theory* could someone start their own CRA business?

No they need to be authorised by the Information Commissioner. Years ago we had a business called ' The Economic League' that kept data on what it regarded as 'troublemakers' 'left wing agitators' etc. they keep their records on paper to avoid being governed by the original DPA that only covered computer records. The current law means they are now gone (in that guise)

PaulW922

agarnett

Presumably your parents got an Experian credit alert because YOU signed them up for the service?

I am sure that the bank did NOT tell your parents to subscribe to Experian, Equifax and CC. They would have advised them to check their file which as you know, is not the same thing.

And JD Williams is not a sole trader as Im sure you are already aware.

Your thread would have more credibility if you had not decided to attack or insult everyone who disagreed with you.

This is a mutual advice and support forum. Sometimes you need to,listen to advice you don't want to hear.

I'm standing by for you to lay into me now.. ��

agarnett

Paul W, I can see you have struggled to extract the detail from a long thread.

I am no more guilty than you in making simple mistakes in analysing what I have seen.

You have made a mistake in jumping to the conclusion that the Experian Alert has some major significance to this story other than the fact that their "Alerts" are almost all irrelevant and many days too late!

Discussing the uselessness of their Alerts (a bit like the uselessness of their credit score) is a distraction. Suffice to say that when signed in, there's either active "alerts" or not. I managed to get my parents signed up and signed in and there were no active alerts. I was able to see the late payment records but they were not flagged as live alerts. "Alerts" equalled "0" in fact. I started this thread, and made a number of calls and started working out what went wrong.

Days later, Experian sent an "alert" email. My natural reaction was "Now what?" I logged in only to find that the now active alert ("Alerts" = "1") was simply the thing I'd discovered days earlier which at that time had triggered nothing! So Experian simply has a dumb computer program, that's all. It cries Wolf! And it cries Wolf at the wrong time and days after the event that should trigger an immediate alert. That's the only relevance of discussing Experian "Alerts" in this thread ... merely as a further symptom of more CRA uselessness.

I am sure that the bank did NOT tell your parents to subscribe to Experian, Equifax and CC. They would have advised them to check their file which as you know, is not the same thing.

Actually no, Paul, we're both wrong - they told ME to subscribe on my parents' behalf. What hairs are you trying to split here? You can be quite sure that just because if you were the Compliance Director at a major bank and would prefer your bank staff to be careful not to "tell" customers to subscribe as opposed to inform them that they could, then you would be dreaming if you thought that was what they did in most cases!

Bank staff merely repeat the same kind of stuff that well meaning peeps post on MSE i.e. subscribe to Experian Equifax Noddle whatever, get your instant report, and cancel the subscription during the free trial period. You see, they are human too! They talk to customers using the resourcefulness of their own brains and own language and tendencies. They aren't all clones of the Compliance or Sales Director's imagination ... although I grant that many are! :rotfl:

And JD Williams is not a sole trader as Im sure you are already aware.

You can be sure that I do now know that JD Williams is not a sole trader because I found it out myself and reported it in this thread. I did not find it out from Experian. Experian gave me bad data on the identity of the data provider, twice actually.

1. they have recorded JD WILLIAMS TA FIFTY PLUS, which to any disciplined businessperson such as myself who is used to dealing with documentation properly attributed to particular legal entities looks like the more or less correct form of a valid sole trader title (TA means "trading as"). But of course it is incorrectly used.
2. they have recorded AMBROSE WILSON which is clearly not an individual named Ambrose from the pub at Emmerdale but is someone's lazy unchecked entry of a firm with Ambrose Wilson in the title. Turns out it is also JD Williams Group in some form or other which remains unclear to this day. Yet there it is in the CRA's database in its uncleaned up form.

As I am sure YOU already know, both these all too brief pieces of data fail to identify any exact entity and would be totally insufficient to use and to successfuly serve any legal notice on the correct legal entity.

I am also guessing you PaulW might have already known that JD WILLIAMS Group whatever that comprises, is responsible for BOTH the recorded credit accounts on my parents' CRA file as you seem so knowledgeable and anxious to offer such precise support.

You have called this a mutual advice and support forum and I've no doubt you can easily point to where it says so - no matter - I did not come here for support - I came here to lay out or lay in a bit of the other thing. So you may take this entire thread as a piece of advice that CRAs serve no useful purpose and that their databases should be destroyed.

So if I have "layed into you" sufficiently that you can now see that, then you are most welcome. If not, well we can but try

meer53

I think CRA's serve a very useful purpose and that their databases should remain. OP you are entitiled to your opinion, just as much as every one else. However, i think you're in the minority on this one.

Baileycat

Let's say Joe Bloggs was squeaky clean a few years ago, in terms of creditworthiness. Then he lost his job/partner died/went bankrupt and all of a sudden the CRAs hammered him with 20 different defaults as he struggled along trying to juggle his financial commitments. Next thing, your "system" comes along and banishes poor old Joe to the "bad boys" category because of his recent string of bad luck. When Joe gets his ducks in order, how can he dig himself out of that "bad boy" chamber if he were, by your system, now unable to prove that his financial status was improving and debts decreasing? Would Joe just be a bad boy forever? Pretty sad for the guy, wouldn't you agree?

DandelionPatrol

meer53 wrote: »

I think CRA's serve a very useful purpose and that their databases should remain. OP you are entitiled to your opinion, just as much as every one else. However, i think you're in the minority on this one.

Minority, yes. On his own, NO.

You have a 1 dimensional view of their usefulness. Even if all the information is true, it is never entirely relevant. As OP's story shows, a bank will easily ignore 60 years of solid experience of a customer for the sake of some misguided tittle tattle about trousers worth £14.99.

It probably is not so much the CRAs as the idiocy of some organisations who interpret the info they hold.

dumpyboy

Baileycat wrote: »

Let's say Joe Bloggs was squeaky clean a few years ago, in terms of creditworthiness. Then he lost his job/partner died/went bankrupt and all of a sudden the CRAs hammered him with 20 different defaults as he struggled along trying to juggle his financial commitments. Next thing, your "system" comes along and banishes poor old Joe to the "bad boys" category because of his recent string of bad luck. When Joe gets his ducks in order, how can he dig himself out of that "bad boy" chamber if he were, by your system, now unable to prove that his financial status was improving and debts decreasing? Would Joe just be a bad boy forever? Pretty sad for the guy, wouldn't you agree?

And this is not happening with the present system ? Information should be the same from every company and cra should have to responsible to make sure what is reported is correct

Thrugelmir

Baileycat wrote: »

all of a sudden the CRAs hammered him with 20 different defaults

Defaults are raised by the business that is owed money to not the CRA's. Best to get your facts right.

GingerBob_3

Baileycat wrote: »

Let's say Joe Bloggs was squeaky clean a few years ago, in terms of creditworthiness. Then he lost his job/partner died/went bankrupt and all of a sudden the CRAs hammered him with 20 different defaults as he struggled along trying to juggle his financial commitments. Next thing, your "system" comes along and banishes poor old Joe to the "bad boys" category because of his recent string of bad luck. When Joe gets his ducks in order, how can he dig himself out of that "bad boy" chamber if he were, by your system, now unable to prove that his financial status was improving and debts decreasing? Would Joe just be a bad boy forever? Pretty sad for the guy, wouldn't you agree?

A good summary of one of the major problems with the CRA system. Joe would for blacklisted for at least six years in this example.


The dysfunctional CRA system fails eminently to identify those individuals who are real credit risks (Joe isn't such a person, though at one point he was). Another major problem with CRA reporting is scope creep, a process which is continuing apace. The original intention of the credit reporting companies was to identify people who failed to keep up payments on loans and catalogue accounts (didn't Experian emerge from GUS, a catalogue company?) The operational scope has now extended to cover all forms of payment, many of which are really not credit-related (i.e. money lending) at all. The upshot is that people are now primarily assessed according to their administrative capabilities when it comes to paying bills on time. This now seems to take precedence over their true credit worthiness.


The CRA databases are behemoths in the extreme, and they continue to slither their slimy tentacles into more and more areas of our lives. The industry is, in effect, unregulated (ICO "regulation" counts for nothing) and out of control. This board is choc full of examples where trivial mistakes and misunderstandings have led to people being blacklisted and consequently unable to obtain credit; and this is aside from the straight mistakes made by CRAs and their customers, which have similar blacklisting effects.


The industry needs root and branch reform. First, entire industry sectors should be banned from reporting; utilities, water, communications, rental sector should not be permitted to report. Next, trivia such as one-off late payments should not be reported. Then, all so-called "positive" reporting should be disallowed. In fact, the only allowable reporting should concern proven missed payments where reminders have been sent. And there are many more reforms that need to be introduced.


Will any of the above happen - of course not! What will happen? Look out for a continued push by the CRAs to obtain financial asset information. This to be viewed alongside liability information to give a "more rounded financial picture of the individual". Note that Equifax already hold details of the value of your property. Then - the CRAs would very much like to link their credit databases to other datasets held by government and the private sector. They could do this by, for example, including your NI number in their files (that's assuming they don't already do so).


CRA databases are, of course, a veritable honey pot as far as the government is concerned. You can expect the government - local and national - to help themselves to ever more generous slices of CRA data without your permission. Ultimately, the CRA databases could form the backbone for a national identity card system - a system which surely will one day be foisted upon us. The Home Office are just waiting for a time when a government sympathetic to this idea is in power. They will then quickly dust off the ID card documentation from the last such attempt.


I wonder if the CRA databases have ever been hacked? That would be the mother of all data breaches. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it's already happened!