O2 contract refusal - CIFAs Protection to blame?

ad1927

Good evening,

I am trying to move to a cheaper SIM only deal with O2 - a really good deal at £5 a month for 10Gb of data.

However, I get this message:

"Your order can't be completed.

As well as our credit scoring system, we use business policies to check all new applications. This time, you didn’t meet the minimum level."

My credit score is very high, but I recently took out CIFAS protection having passed some information onto potential fraudsters.  

Is there any way I can get around this?

HillStreetBlues

First credit score you see are meaningless,  each company will have their own.
If O2 don't want you as their customer, there is little you can do.

But I would check you credit files to see if O2 have picked on something.

ad1927

HillStreetBlues said:

First credit score you see are meaningless,  each company will have their own.
If O2 don't want you as their customer, there is little you can do.

But I would check you credit files to see if O2 have picked on something.

There's absolutely nothing on my credit files - no debts (aside from mortgage), no missed payments, no hard searches, no soft searches.  I suspect it is the CIFA protection?

HillStreetBlues

If you have tried at different times, then there is little more that you can do.

They won't tell you a reason just you failed the check. A call centre staff might have a guess, but that's not much use to you.

DullGreyGuy

ad1927 said:

HillStreetBlues said:

First credit score you see are meaningless,  each company will have their own.
If O2 don't want you as their customer, there is little you can do.

But I would check you credit files to see if O2 have picked on something.

There's absolutely nothing on my credit files - no debts (aside from mortgage), no missed payments, no hard searches, no soft searches.  I suspect it is the CIFA protection?

if there is nothing on your credit files other than a mortgage that could also be the problem, a lack of history is second only to a bad history.

Havent seen how CIFAS protection works these days but certainly used to be the case that they'd contact you to validate the credit application was from you before giving the all clear. Not all creditors wanted to invest the time/effort to deal with this as they wanted straight through processing for easy websales etc not a team of underwriters reviewing decisions and giving "maybe" decisions 

born_again

Could well be CIFAS protection as a DD will be payment method.
Might be worth a phone call to them, or a trip to one of their shops & explain.

KittenChops

DullGreyGuy said:

ad1927 said:

HillStreetBlues said:

First credit score you see are meaningless,  each company will have their own.
If O2 don't want you as their customer, there is little you can do.

But I would check you credit files to see if O2 have picked on something.

There's absolutely nothing on my credit files - no debts (aside from mortgage), no missed payments, no hard searches, no soft searches.  I suspect it is the CIFA protection?

if there is nothing on your credit files other than a mortgage that could also be the problem, a lack of history is second only to a bad history.

Havent seen how CIFAS protection works these days but certainly used to be the case that they'd contact you to validate the credit application was from you before giving the all clear. Not all creditors wanted to invest the time/effort to deal with this as they wanted straight through processing for easy websales etc not a team of underwriters reviewing decisions and giving "maybe" decisions 

I haven't been a CIFAS member (I used to work in financial services) for 15+ years now, so this may be out of date...
One of the conditions for an organisation to use CIFAS, was that they absolutely must not treat certain CIFAS markers (victim of impersonation or protective registration) as a derogatory marker.  It simply meant they had to take additional steps to confirm the identity of the person in question.

Ectophile

You may need to go into an O2 shop, armed with photo ID.

The chances are that their computer system tried to do a hard credit search on you.  It got back a message saying that additional verification was required.  It didn't know how to handle that and treated it as a credit check failed.