Experian subscription

brewerdave

Some 8 or 9 years ago, I was offered a free 12 month trial of Credit Expert when I took out a home insurance policy.
Before the end of the year, I phoned up to discontinue so I didn't get charged after the trial period.
HOWEVER, over the past 8 years or so, I've received alerts and been able to log in to see my credit file without ever being charged!:T
Out of the blue I received an email today, announcing the cancellation of my account - but saying that if I logged in ,my account would be reinstated -at £14.99 PER MONTH :eek: Are they having a larf??
Surely no-one pays £180 per annum to monitor their credit situation with just one agency??

wouldbeqaulitymoneysaver2

Hidden charges? Deceptive contract.

Thrugelmir

brewerdave wrote: »

Surely no-one pays £180 per annum to monitor their credit situation with just one agency??

Some people do.

Experian have to cover their costs somehow.

Arleen

brewerdave wrote: »

Surely no-one pays £180 per annum to monitor their credit situation with just one agency??

You would be surprised how many people think that there actually is a "credit score" which is then used by lenders. And only way to get that magical "score" is to sign up at 15quid/month.

brewerdave

Arleen wrote: »

You would be surprised how many people think that there actually is a "credit score" which is then used by lenders. And only way to get that magical "score" is to sign up at 15quid/month.

Guess it must be something like that - I seem to remember that the monthly sub. was much cheaper when I had the trial - £4.99 per month possibly.

gropinginthedark

Experian subscription is completely worthless. I got turned down for a £5 a month SIM card, reason given "credit check at Experian" so I took the free trial. Score is a perfect 999, home owner (detached, very good area), no mortgage, good rock solid pension income, never had any CCJs or bad debts.

Seems to me the Experian stuff is meaningless. Reading around, people say the "lender" may reject for their own reasons nothing to do with Experian. Or possibly because the Experian ranking is too good, the lender is looking for more profitable business from people who don't pay on time so they can hit them with penalties.

Anyway I think lenders should be required to explain rejections and certainly not tell a lie that leads me to risk a £15 fee at Experian to check.
If it's because of something like age discrimination then news will get around and consumers can draw their own conclusions and maybe government will get involved as has happened recently with age discrimination in mortgage refusals.

UPDATE:
having signed up to the free and very informative MSE Credit Club (meaning no need to stump up the extortionate fees the credit reference agencies charge) I found this comment in a section explaining why you might be rejected despite an excellent credit score: "the lender may reject you as it doesn't think it'll make money from you".

I still think lenders should be under an obligation to provide an explanation of rejection. Mine did but it was essentially a lie: They said it was based on a credit check at Experian but the implication of that is that I'm not creditworthy whereas in fact I infer that the rejection may have been because they can see I pay off promptly and offer no scope for cross selling so I'd not be profitable. But may have been is still just an inference - just suppose the additional checks a lender made was looking at any social network profiles and basing the decision on gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality. Unless there's an honest verifiable explanation they could be using any of those factors.

Anyway it turned out they did me a favour - I got a better SIM deal elsewhere (much bigger data allowance - which I occasionally do need but not often) and did themselves a disfavour as I normally use less than 10% of my data allowance and much less of free SMS & phone calls so I don't cost the provider much.

BTW the provider that rejected me was TalkMobile, the one that offered a better deal and accepted me was iDMobile. (currently £5 gets at TM 100 minutes of calls, 100MB of data, iD give 250 mins calls, 1GB data)

brewerdave

@gropinginthedark -fair point - I paid my mortgage off 10 years ago and always pay my credit cards off in full - one "banker" I talked with recently,suggested that I might not be considered a good risk for a car loan !! Good job I can afford to use cash!

GingerBob_3

gropinginthedark wrote: »

Experian subscription is completely worthless. I got turned down for a £5 a month SIM card, reason given "credit check at Experian" so I took the free trial. Score is a perfect 999, home owner (detached, very good area), no mortgage, good rock solid pension income, never had any CCJs or bad debts.

Seems to me the Experian stuff is meaningless. Reading around, people say the "lender" may reject for their own reasons nothing to do with Experian. Or possibly because the Experian ranking is too good, the lender is looking for more profitable business from people who don't pay on time so they can hit them with penalties.

Anyway I think lenders should be required to explain rejections and certainly not tell a lie that leads me to risk a £15 fee at Experian to check.
If it's because of something like age discrimination then news will get around and consumers can draw their own conclusions and maybe government will get involved as has happened recently with age discrimination in mortgage refusals.

At the moment, Experian only see one half of your finances, so your assets and aspects of your property (other than the price it was last sold for) are not known to them as far as credit reporting is concerned. However, they have a voracious appetite for personal data. They collect a massive amount of data about the whole population and store it in numerous other databases aside from the CAIS credit checking system. Also, it's unclear to everyone here just how they report a credit check to one of their customers. What precisely do they report? No one knows, and I've yet to see an example of the type of information they provide in this resect. You need to smack them with SAR. It may give some sort of clue as to what's really going on.

Paulautodetail

With clearscore it's free for life for your credit report, would recommend

brewerdave

....and despite the fact that they tell me the account is cancelled, I am still getting email alerts for credit searches (I've been looking for home insurance) -not going to log in as I'm not paying £14.99 !!!