It will be a credit to you
By Herb Drill
You can make up your own list, but alphabetically or otherwise, Bank of America, ChoicePoint, and LexisNexis will come up somewhere in a discussion of "Identity Theft" and "Credit Scores, Credit Cards." Those are two new books from Los Angeles-based Silver Lake Publishing.
More so almost every day, theft of credit data is a growing issue, and more problems are likely in coming months. A new book claims the solution is the public paying strict a and taking control.
Just scan the headlines! In early March, information broker LexisNexis admitted ID thieves, using stolen passwords from legitimate customers, had stolen personal information on as many as 32,000 U.S. citizens from one of its databases. That was preceded a few weeks earlier by a similar problem at ChoicePoint Inc. There, thieves impersonating legitimate businesses stole personal financial data on as many as 145,000 people.
About the same time, Bank of America announced it had “lost” personal financial information related to some 1.2 million federal government employees (including some members of Congress) with BofA credit cards.
These problems and the concern more announcements are coming have caused some calls for greater government oversight of the consumer credit information industry.
Will more government rules really accomplish anything? Silver Lake Publishing’s new book - Credit Scores, Credit Cards: How Consumer Finance Works/How to Avoid Mistakes and Manage Your Accounts Well -makes the case consumers need to protect themselves from ID theft by knowing more about how the credit system works.
“It’s easy to schedule hearings on Capital Hill where politicians can rant about security breaches. Especially when some of their own information has been stolen,” says Silver Lake editorial director James Walsh. “We’ve got laws on the books that regulate how personal financial information is used by credit bureaus. The real problem is consumers don’t pay enough attention to who’s got their information. In an economy that relies so much on consumer credit, that’s really bad.”
There’s no way a consumer can make sure his or her information in a credit bureau’s databases is absolutely secure. The best method of prevention is to watch information closely and recognize errors or abuses as soon as possible. The book gives readers an eight-point process for making sure their information at the major credit bureaus is accurate and as secure as possible:
· Get a copy of your credit report from each of the three major U.S. credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion).
· Make a copy of each report.
· Mark up each report, focusing first on any errors in your name, address, or other contact information.
· Next, review all credit accounts in the report. Make sure they reflect the right names of lenders, the right account numbers, current balances, and proper payment histories.
· If you find errors on the credit accounts portion of a report, make copies of your own bills or statements that show the right information.
(If you have to contact the credit card company or lender to get this information, do so.) Attach these support documents to the marked-up copy of the report.
· Write a cover letter to each bureau’s consumer service office that
explains the errors you’ve found on the report. If the errors involve credit accounts, copy the relevant card company or lender with a complete package (cover letter, report mark-up, and support documents).
· Send the main package and all copies by certified mail with return
receipt, so you have proof of when you sent the information and it was received.
· Repeat the process at least once a year.
The credit bureau must respond to your letter within 30 days. It must either fix the errors or send you an explanation of why it doesn’t. If it claims its information is accurate, it must supply its own support documents that prove this. The credit bureaus (called credit reporting agencies or CRAs in regulatory jargon) are only part of the consumer finance system. None of the three major bureaus in the U.S. were implicated directly in the recent problems.
CRAs and the companies that actually sell personal information are often connected in a complex web of corporate affiliations. For example, the LexisNexis database attacked by ID thieves was called Accurint, and was itself part of a company called Seisint, which LexisNexis acquired recently.
Likewise, ChoicePoint is a corporate sibling of the credit bureau Equifax.
Security becomes an issue when a person’s financial information appears in so many databases that no one has control of the data. “The best thing an individual consumer can do is make sure his or her financial information appears in as few places as possible. Reduce the number of credit cards and other consumer finance accounts you have. Make sure you tell the companies whose accounts you do keep not to share your information.
Keep in contact with the credit bureaus at least once a year.”
Remember that credit reporting agencies aren’t designed to serve consumers. They are designed to serve the companies (banks, credit card issuers, mortgage firms, and vehicle lenders) that offer consumer credit.
“You begin to understand the attitudes that CRAs take toward individual people when you see that basic truth,” says Walsh. “Their customer service is notoriously bad and their security is shaky because the whole system is built to serve the credit card companies and home equity lenders. It’s not built to serve you.”
For more information, contact Jamie MacKinnon, at 1-360-532-5758, or publicist@silverlakepub.com. Credit Scores, Credit Cards: How Consumer Finance Works/How to Avoid Mistakes and Manage Your Accounts Well by the Silver Lake Editors, costs $11.95 and is 288 pages (4½” x 7¾”/trade paperback, ISBN: 1-56343-782-1).