Inquiries and privacy - how to get anyone's SSN

It seems to me that the promotional inquiries are a violation of the FCRA in that they never received your permission nor do they currently have an account with you.
Since they are coded as soft inquiries they don't harm your score-but they are still a violation with the $1000 fine(and a violation of Privacy).
Now on the TU credit report they claim the companies in the Promotional Inquiry section don't receive full files. I'm not sure I believe them.
On Experian's web site the explanation of the requests viewed only by you list is...

REQUESTS VIEWED ONLY BY YOU lists all who have a permissible purpose by law and have requested in the recent past to review your information. You may not have initiated these requests, so you may not recognize each source. We offer information about you to those with a permissible purpose, for example, to:

• other creditors who want to offer you preapproved credit;
• an employer who wishes to extend an offer of employment;
• a potential investor in assessing the risk of a current obligation;
• Experian Consumer Assistance to process a report for you;
• your existing creditors to monitor your credit activity (date listed may reflect only the most recent request).
"
Sounds like people are getting full files to me(who says to be in violation you have to receive 100% of the files ? I don't think anyone receives 100%of the files). Now the last time I checked just because someone wants to preapprove me for credit doesn't mean they can look at my credit file. Hell couldn't I look at anyone's file with that pretense(and then just not offer the preapproval)? I would love to hear someone shoot down my thought-- although truth be told I would like to get a lot more privacy and a whole bunch of $1000 checks even more...

They do not see your credit file. I'm not sure exactly what they get, but I believe it is name and address and whether or not you match a specific criteria (i.e. a score of 680 and above with no derogs, etc.)


L

First of all the FCRA specifically authorizes promotional inquiries as ok. A potential credit grantor will get the names and addresses of people who fit their selection criteria. You can break it down however you want, like all women living in Nevada who have no derogatories in the past year or whatever.

If you don't want promotional inquiries call 888-5-OPTOUT

This is really frightening, just rereading the law, it looks like anyone who is thinking about extending credit can look at your file as long as the names of the creditors aren't listed. Thank god the bureaus don't allow just anyone to do so.

Let me educate you:

The End of Privacy
Adam L. Penenberg, Forbes Magazine

THE PHONE RANG AND A STRANGER CRACKED SING-SONGY AT THE OTHER END OF the line: "Happy Birthday." That was spooky--the next day I would turn 37. "Your full name is Adam Landis Penenberg," the caller continued. "Landis?" My mother's maiden name. "I'm touched," he said. Then Daniel Cohn, Web detective, reeled off the rest of my "base identifiers"--my birth date, address in New York, Social Security number. Just two days earlier I had issued Cohn a challenge: Starting with my byline, dig up as much information about me as you can. "That didn't take long," I said.

"It took about five minutes," Cohn said, cackling back in Boca Raton, Fla. "I'll have the rest within a week." And the line went dead.

In all of six days Dan Cohn and his Web detective agency, Docusearch.com, shattered every notion I had about privacy in this country (or whatever remains of it). Using only a keyboard and the phone, he was able to uncover the innermost details of my life--whom I call late at night; how much money I have in the bank; my salary and rent. He even got my unlisted phone numbers, both of them. Okay, so you've heard it before: America, the country that made "right to privacy" a credo, has lost its privacy to the computer. But it's far worse than you think. Advances in smart data-sifting techniques and the rise of massive databases have conspired to strip you naked. The spread of the Web is the final step. It will make most of the secrets you have more instantly available than ever before, ready to reveal themselves in a few taps on the keyboard.

For decades this information rested in remote mainframes that were difficult to access, even for the techies who put it there. The move to desktop PCs and local servers in the 1990s has distributed these data far and wide. Computers now hold half a billion bank accounts, half a billion credit card accounts, hundreds of millions of mortgages and retirement funds and medical claims and more. The Web seamlessly links it all together. As e-commerce grows, marketers and busybodies will crack open a cache of new consumer data more revealing than ever before (see box, p. 188). It will be a salesman's dream--and a paranoid's nightmare. Adding to the paranoia: Hundreds of data sleuths like Dan Cohn of Docusearch have opened up shop on the Web to sell precious pieces of these data. Some are ethical; some aren't. They mine celebrity secrets, spy on business rivals and track down hidden assets, secret lovers and deadbeat dads. They include Strategic Data Service (at datahawk.com) and Infoseekers.com and Dig Dirt Inc. (both at the PI Mall, www.pimall.com).

Cohn's firm will get a client your unlisted number for $49, your Social Security number for $49 and your bank balances for $45. Your driving record goes for $35; tracing a cell phone number costs $84. Cohn will even tell someone what stocks, bonds and securities you own (for $209). As with computers, the price of information has plunged.

You may well ask: What's the big deal? We consumers are as much to blame as marketers for all these loose data. At every turn we have willingly given up a layer of privacy in exchange for convenience; it is why we use a credit card to shop, enduring a barrage of junk mail. Why should we care if our personal information isn't so personal anymore?

Well, take this test: Next time you are at a party, tell a stranger your salary, checking account balance, mortgage payment and Social Security number. If this makes you uneasy, you have your answer.

"If the post office said we have to use transparent envelopes, people would go crazy, because the fact is we all have something to hide," says Edward Wade, a privacy advocate who wrote Identity Theft: The Cybercrime of the Millennium (Loompanics Unlimited, 1999) under the pseudonym John Q. Newman.

You can do a few things about it (see box, p. 186). Give your business to the companies that take extra steps to safeguard your data and will guarantee it. Refuse to reveal your Social Security number--the key for decrypting your privacy--to all but the financial institutions required by law to record it.

Do something, because many banks, brokerages, credit card issuers and others are lax, even careless, about locking away your records. They take varied steps in trying to protect your privacy (see box, p. 187). Some sell information to other marketers, and many let hundreds of employees access your data. Some workers, aiming to please, blithely hand out your account number, balance and more whenever someone calls and asks for it. That's how Cohn pierced my privacy.

"You call up a company and make it seem like you're a spy on a covert mission, and only they can help you,"he says. "It works every time. All day long I deal with spy wannabes."

I'm not the paranoid type; I don't see a huddle on TV and think that 11 football players are talking about me. But things have gone too far. A stalker would kill for the wealth of information Cohn was able to dig up. A crook could parlay the data into credit card scams and "identity theft," pilfering my good credit rating and using it to pull more ripoffs.

Cohn operates in this netherworld of private eyes, ex-spooks and ex-cops, retired military men, accountants and research librarians. Now 39, he grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr, attended Penn State and joined the Navy in 1980 for a three-year stint. In 1987 Cohn formed his own agency to investigate insurance fraud and set up shop in Florida. "There was no shortage of work," he says. He invented a "video periscope" that could rise up through the roof of a van to record a target's scam.

In 1995 he founded Docusearch with childhood pal KennethZeiss. They fill up to 100 orders a day on the Web, and expect $1 million in business this year. Their clients include lawyers, insurers, private eyes; the Los Angeles Pension Union is a customer, and Citibank's legal recovery department uses Docusearch to find debtors on the run.

Cohn, Zeiss and 13 researchers (6 of them licensed P.I.s) work out of the top floor of a dull, five-story office building in Boca Raton, Fla., sitting in cubicles under a fluorescent glare and taking orders from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Their Web site is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You click through it and load up an on-line shopping cart as casually as if you were at Amazon.com.

The researchers use sharp sifting methods, but Cohn also admits to misrepresenting who he is and what he is after. He says the law lets licensed investigators use such tricks as "pretext calling," fooling company employees into divulging customer data over the phone (legal in all but a few states). He even claims to have a government source who provides unpublished numbers for a fee, "and you'll never figure out how he is paid because there's no paper trail."

Yet Cohn claims to be more scrupulous than rivals. "Unlike an information broker, I won't break the law. I turn down jobs, like if a jealous boyfriend wants to find out where his ex is living." He also says he won't resell the information to anyone else.

Let's hope not. Cohn's first step into my digital domain was to plug my name into the credit bureaus--Transunion, Equifax, Experian. In minutes he had my Social Security number, address and birth date. Credit agencies are supposed to ensure that their subscribers (retailers, auto dealers, banks, mortgage companies) have a legitimate need to check credit.

"We physically visit applicants to make sure they live up to our service agreement," says David Mooney of Equifax, which keeps records on 200 million Americans and shares them with 114,000 clients. He says resellers of the data must do the same. "It's rare that anyone abuses the system." But Cohn says he gets his data from a reseller, and no one has ever checked up on him.

Armed with my credit header, Dan Cohn tapped other sites. A week after my birthday, true to his word, he faxed me a three-page summary of my life. He had pulled up my utility bills, my two unlisted phone numbers and my finances.

This gave him the ability to map my routines, if he had chosen to do so: how much cash I burn in a week ( $400), how much I deposit twice a month ( $3,061), my favorite neighborhood bistro (the Flea Market Cafe), the $720 monthly checks I write out to one Judith Pekowsky: my psychotherapist. (When you live in New York, you see a shrink; it's the law.) If I had an incurable disease, Cohn could probably find that out, too.

He had my latest phone bill ( $108) and a list of long distance calls made from home--including late-night fiber-optic dalliances (which soon ended) with a woman who traveled a lot. Cohn also divined the phone numbers of a few of my sources, underground computer hackers who aren't wanted by the police--but probably should be.

Knowing my Social Security number and other personal details helped Cohn get access to a Federal Reserve database that told him where I had deposits. Cohn found accounts I had forgotten long ago: $503 at Apple Bank for Savings in an account held by a long-ago landlord as a security deposit; $7 in a dormant savings account at Chase Manhattan Bank; $1,000 in another Chase account.

A few days later Cohn struck the mother lode. He located my cash management account, opened a few months earlier at Merrill Lynch &Co. That gave him a peek at my balance, direct deposits from work, withdrawals, ATM visits, check numbers with dates and amounts, and the name of my broker.

That's too much for some privacy hawks. "If someone can call your bank and get them to release account information without your consent, it means you have no privacy," says Russell Smith, director of Consumer.net in Alexandria, Va., who has won more than $40,000 suing telemarketers for bothering him. "The two issues are knowledge and control: You should know what information about you is out there, and you should be able to control who gets it."

How did Cohn get hold of my Merrill Lynch secrets? Directly from the source. Cohn says he phoned Merrill Lynch and talked to one of 500 employees who can tap into my data. "Hi, I'm Dan Cohn, a licensed state investigator conducting an investigation of an Adam Penenberg," he told the staffer, knowing the words "licensed" and "state" make it sound like he works for law enforcement.

Then he recited my Social Security, birth date and address, "and before I could get out anything more he spat out your account number." Cohn told the helpful worker: "I talked to Penenberg's broker, um, I can't remember his name...."

"Dan Dunn?" the Merrill Lynch guy asked. "Yeah, Dan Dunn," Cohn said. The staffer then read Cohn my complete history--balance, deposits, withdrawals, check numbers and amounts. "You have to talk in the lingo the bank people talk so they don't even know they are being taken," he says.

Merrill's response: It couldn't have happened this way--and if it did, it's partly my fault. Merrill staff answers phoned-in questions only when the caller provides the full account number or personal details, Merrill spokesperson Bobbie Collins says.
She adds that I could have insisted on an "additional telephonic security code" the caller would have to punch in before getting information, and that this option was disclosed when I opened my CMA. Guess I didn't read the fine print, not that it mattered: Cohn says he got my account number from the Merrill rep.

Sprint, my long distance carrier, investigated how my account was breached and found that a Mr. Penenberg had called to inquire about my most recent bill. Cohn says only that he called his government contact. Whoever made the call, "he posed as you and had enough information to convince our customer service representative that he was you," says Russ R. Robinson, a Sprint spokesman. "We want to make it easy for our customers to do business with us over the phone, so you are darned if you do and darned if you don't."

Bell Atlantic, my local phone company, told me a similar tale, only it was a Mrs. Penenberg who called in on behalf of her husband. I recently attended a conference in Las Vegas but don't remember having tied the knot.

For the most part Cohn's methods fly below the radar of the law. "There is no general law that protects consumers' privacy in the U.S.," says David Banisar, a Washington lawyer who helped found the Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.epic.org). In Europe companies classified as "data controllers" can't hand out your personal details without your permission, but the U.S. has as little protection as China, he contends.

The "credit header"--name, address, birth date, Social Security--used to be kept confidential under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. But in 1989 the Federal Trade Commission exempted it from such protection, bowing to the credit bureaus, bail bondsmen and private eyes.

Some piecemeal protections are in place: a 1984 act protecting cable TV bills; the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, passed after a newspaper published the video rental records of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. "It's crazy, but your movie rental history is more protected under the law than your credit history is," says Wade, the author.

Colorado is one of the few states that prohibit "pretext calling" by someone pretending to be someone else. In July James Rapp, 39, and wife Regana, 29, who ran info-broker Touch Tone Information out of a strip mall in Aurora, Colo., were charged with impersonating the Ramseys--of the JonBenet child murder case--to get hold of banking records that might be related to the case.

Congress may get into the act with bills to outlaw pretext calling. But lawyer Banisar says more than 100 privacy bills filed in the past two years have gone nowhere. He blames "an unholy alliance between marketers and government agencies that want access" to their data.

Indeed, government agencies are some of the worst offenders in selling your data. In many states the Department of Motor Vehicles was a major peddler of personal data until Congress passed the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994, pushing states to enact laws that let drivers block distribution of their names and addresses. Some states, such as Georgia, take it seriously, but South Carolina has challenged it all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Oral arguments are scheduled for this month.

As originally conceived, Social Security numbers weren't to be used for identification purposes. But nowadays you are compelled by law to give an accurate number to a bank or other institution that pays you interest or dividends; thank you, Internal Revenue Service. The bank, in turn, just might trade that number away to a credit bureau--even if you aren't applying for credit. That's how snoops can tap so many databases.

Here's a theoretical way to stop this linking process without compromising the IRS' ability to track unreported income: Suppose that, instead of issuing you a single 9-digit number, the IRS gave you a dozen 11-digit numbers and let you report income under any of them. You could release one to your employer, another to your broker, a third to your health insurer, a fourth to the firms that need to know your credit history. It would be hard for a sleuth to know that William H. Smith 001-24-7829-33 was the same as 350-68-4561-49. Your digital personas would converge at only one point in cyberspace, inside the extremely well guarded computers of the IRS.

But for now, you have to fend for yourself by being picky about which firms you do business with and how much you tell them. If you are opening a bank account with no credit attached to it, ask the bank to withhold your Social Security number from credit bureaus. Make sure your broker gives you, as Merrill Lynch does, the option of restricting telephone access to your account, and use it. If a business without a legitimate need for the Social Security number asks for it, leave the space blank--or fill it with an incorrect number. (Hint: To make it look legitimate, use an even number between 10 and 90 for the middle two digits.)

Daniel Cohn makes no apologies for how he earns a living. He sees himself as a data-robbing Robin Hood. "The problem isn't the amount of information available, it's the fact that until recently only the wealthy could afford it. That's where we come in."

In the meantime, until a better solution emerges, I'm starting over: I will change all of my bank, utility and credit-card account numbers and apply for new unlisted phone numbers. That should keep the info-brokers at bay for a while--at least for the next week or two.

(from http://www.docusearch.com/forbes1.html)

http://www.datahawk.com/locate-ssn.htm

"the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, passed after a newspaper published the video rental records of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork."

I wonder what Act would pass if somebody spent a few thousand to publish a bunch of info on Jodie Bernstein (FTC), all Supreme Court Judges, and all CRA execs and board members?

you got it-- they can pass all the acts they want, and for practical purposes all they're passing is gas, and not the kind you can use for driving or heating your home. laws that no one ever enforces are worth what???? i have a letter from wells fargo denying one of my mortgage applications citing credit score as the reason; this is a clear violation of both state [massachusetts] and federal fair lending statute. i squawk like the head of a chicken with its body cut off, and who listens??? the answer is:-- nobody. wells fargo refunded my $450 appraisal fee after my mortgage broker wrote them a long letter of appeal providing proof to his superiors that i met all criteria defined as an acceptable alternative to the magical 680 middle FICO score. they denied me anyway.

privacy has gone the way of the do-do as well. this is the Future--defective computer programs control our lives, and Big Brother & Sons know our diaper and bowel habits. keyword "unfortunately" and you know you're screwed when you hear it. "sorry, you have no rights." that's the word, but it's nastifully nicely concealed with the sweetest coat of crap since chocolate-covered ants and bees.

that's the way it is, and don't bother to scream, because nobody will hear. you can find a biblical reference at revelation 13:10-18; i attribute the first part of this chapter to the third reich, and can substantiate and correlate much of today's abrogation of rights of the people to nostradamus' writings as well.

this is their hour-- all we can do is fight for truth as best we can, and be prepared for the consequences. this i say from a legal as much as a philosophical standpoint; i was a linguistics major at harvard, class of 1990.

i've been known as a babillard and idiot, called much worse, but it was never my choice to be dragged in on this thing-- i had a very successful career in property development running smoothly until FICO scoring came along and ruined it. the way it looks now, this is just the beginning of the worst for everyone-- :(

Doug, do you really think Jodie Bernstein (FTC), all Supreme Court Judges, and all CRA execs and board members would NOT care if I published a page about each one of these fine people, with their full name, home address, SSN, drivers license number and home phone - so that our credit disputes and credit scoring complaints can be submitted directly to them?

let's see.

i posted my contact up here over a week ago, and nobody has replied-- not one soul. i like the idea, but in all honesty, i don't think they'll care unless female members start getting crank calls at home, and i don't think any of them will do anything about it. as depressing and cynical as my reply may sound, i think you said it straight. do you think supreme a court justice would undertake the years of research you and i have? how many do you imagine have been "lobbyed?" these folks are dealing with life and death issues every day-- things like who should be our new president when the state of florida has defective voting machines, just like fannie and freddie are using defective credit scoring software to control the lending industry?? file a suit now and it may be heard sometime in 2007.

to sum it all up, my answer is NO-- publish their names, numbers, social security numbers, and any and all other information about these people you can here at bayhouse or in any forum you could possibly access, and they will do nothing. they might change their phone number or email address, and making public social security numbers might result in legal action against somebody pulling off identity theft [and could open you for a lawsuit or two,] but that's about it.

instead of doing this with lawmakers, try it with the principals of {UN}fair isaac. these are the authors of all our misery, and could give a flying isaac about your rights, my rights, or anybody else's rights. you can be damn sure they know how to handle accounts and credit so they don't get turned down for a 70% LTV loan on a primary residence with $300,000 in equity, or can't check into the hotel when they arrive from the airport in icy, pouring rain and lo and behold, can't check into their hotel room. you know what we all have to deal with, so let's give these bastards a taste of their own qopf syrup. please contact me directly for further details--:cool:

thanks, and have a hugg--

Well, if they don't care, well, we don't have a problem then :)

Why would they sue me?

Why should we care?

Want to do it again? (http://www.fulldisclosure.org/stalk.html and http://www.fulldisclosure.org/forbes.html)

Things haven't changed. Privacy is a non-issue.

christine, please post up all the information you have about every consituent of this mega-fraud, and see what happens. they don't care, and apart from changing a phone number or social security number, they will do nothing. let the world know everything they ever did, credit profile, bank accounts, life histories-- it's all in the public domain anyway, free for the asking or available at nominal charge, so along with the Unfortunatlies, they'll tell you to do the worst you can on them, and laugh it off.

{UN}fair isaac doesn't care how their defective product is being abused to the detriment of fellow americans, whether or not this pattern destroys people's lives, prevents them from driving a car or from insuring their homes and businesses, or can put a hard- working family out on the street. all they care about is profit and agrandisement, seeking to spread their "risk" based mentality and the milion$ of $$$$ it makes them every day outside of this country and into the whole world.

the main problem today is a lack of public awareness-- this thing is like the leach; it latches on with an anesthetic saliva, sucks the life blood out of its victim, and then quietly departs. virtually every american consumer is being leached by the lending industry and federally sanctioned empowerments to exact largely transparent premiums upon anyone who borrows money for any purpose. in most cases, this parasitic activity draw little or no attention from the host at all-- what they never know won't hurt them, so the leach swims off and returns to feed upon the next unsuspecting victim another day.

i ask people every day if they know what FICO scoring is, or what credit scoring is-- most don't have a clue. they may have heard of fannie mae and freddie mac, but virtually nobody knows how the federal mortgage clearing houses work, what they do, where the hundreds of billions of funds come from, and where it all goes. let there be no misunderstanding-- fannie and freddie now delegate ALL lending decisions to the computer programs authored by our great friend, {UN}fair isaac. every mortgage lending decision in this country today making use of federally discounted funds that pass through the fannie mae and freddie mac clearing houses is made by these programs. the applicant's numerical score these programs generate is sacro-sainte in the indsutry-- it cannot be disputed or over-ridden by anyone under any circumstances; its output is law. errors and misinformation appearing on applicants' credit profiles must be corrected by the repositories, with change to a borrower's credit score reflected in real time, before it can be considered acceptable. notarized documents, and even physical attendance of a creditor prepared to swear under oath that they did something wrong which blemished a borrower's credit profile, is unacceptable until it is recorded with the repositories, and the change is reflected by improvement of the applicant's FICO score.


i strongly doubt that this pack of computer tekkies out of MIT way back in the 50's could ever have imagined what would become of their work decades later. in my view, they owe their success to a concept, much more than a technique, of evaluating the viability of applicants for consumer credit. similar to the scores we all got on our SAT tests when preparing for admission to college, these folks sought to condense and convert credit applicants' profiles to a similar numerical value, in an attempt to accurately evaluate the prospective borrower's probable future performance with respect to financial obligations. the IDEA is ingenious; substituting this for all traditional lending and underwriting procedures is an absolute disaster. even worse, the lending industry has turned the logic of numerical credit scoring upside-down, using it now as an excuse to price-gouge the majority of consumers, according to how they end up positioned upon a computer-generated bell curve. this is a gravely flawed and grossly unfair methodolgy that determines who can borrow money for the basic essentials in life, most often to purchase or refinance a home.

the capabilities and limitations of modern computer technologies are no secret-- hardware is quite straightforward, and software can only direct the machine to do what it is told to do, and works only with the data it is given. FICO credit scoring models attempt to place each applicant onto a bell curve along with thousands or even millions of other applicants deemed to be similar. with that many people sitting on a sliding scale in real time, any person's place is quite likely to shift arbitrarily, based not upon how they handle their own finances, but how a great many others on that same curve may be handling theirs. this provides a relative view of how one person may compare to another, but offers virtually no insight whatsoever into any one individual's spending habits, how and why they borrow, and what their attitudes about credit and repayment may be. a busboy earning $7 and hour sitting on his father's american express card with a $2000 credit limit gets a score of 750, while a real estate developer making $140,000 a year who owns $1.6 million is property with 15 years of flawless repayment history comes in at 614.

it is beyond the capability of even the finest mainframe computers on earth to predict human behaviors to the extent the lending industry now trusts {UN}fair isaac with its government protection and secrecy to dictate terms and conditions, and act as anything more than a clandestine mechanism to usurp the disadvantaged and quietly cheat and legally leach upon the most conscientious and responsible american consumer, those who use credit for building security for themsleves, providing jobs for others, and living up to their obligations as best they can-- at least when the rules of the game aren't changed as i'm dribbling the ball in for a classic layup. the ref may call foul on me, but i'm caling foul on the ref's ref:-- the one who suddenly decides that i'm afoul because of the stripes on my socks.

i grade credit reports almost daily on my job--- i've been doing it for years, but when somebody applies for an apartment with me, i assemble a complete profile of who they are, what they do, and if there's an issue with credit, i address it accordingly. do i reject applicants because of their credit history?-- yes, occasionaly. the truly bad applicants usually shine with rudolph-red warning signs long before i run credit report. my department doesn't use credit scoring at all--it's expensive, and FICO scores mean nothing at all to me; as i say above, it's a computer generated bell-curve rating comparing strangers to strangers. i'll put money where my mouth is, and go head-to-quackware up against {UN}fair isaac any day of the year. 13 years renting apartments, and my placements are nearly 98% successful-- this record is shared by my department, and we never use credit scores of any kind. trouble has a certain aire to it, something computers have yet to pick up on.

PUBLIC AWARENESS AND INFORMATION IS THE KEY--- this is like economic HIV, and nobody understands what it is and what it is doing to the american dream. FICO scoring alone has destroyed my livelihood, wiped out my retirement money, and forced me to liquidate one wonderfully profitable property to get out from the sub-prime mortgages and other debt i was unable to consolidate into one low-rate, tax-deductible fannie/freddie loan product.

no action is being taken against this economic disease because virtually NOBODY even knows that it exists. my self-employment and entreprenurial endeavors just so happen to have made this a chain-saw amputation for me, while for most consumers it's just a mosquito or painless leaches who take a bite or two and then move on to the next unwitting victim. one big pack of the finest attorneys in boston couldn't come up with a viable legal course of action-- the law firm in philadelphia seems to have assembled a group of plaintiffs large enough to bring a class action up against fannie and freddie; my search for fellow victims was unfruitful. at present, i've been advised to sit aside and not enjoin to the class action now in progress-- my damages are sufficient to serve as a model for a new class action that will be filed in boston district 5 federal court if the philadelphia suit fails; if it proceeds, i will sue independently. once fannie and freddie are obliged to answer for this abomination, they can point the finger in only one direction. we all know where that is--- [san rafael, ca.]

i could keep going-- my postings are long, rambling sometimes. one massive mistake was made back in 1996 when fannie and freddie did what we might want to think was right-- today it's the biggest ripoff in american history, and if you ask around, you'll be sadly surprised to know how few people know what it is, or that it's even there at all. enter FICO:- the great american silent shaft. the IRS uses coarse sandpaper-- the lending industry a la FICO does it with xylocaine condoms. "you won't feel a thing....."

goodnight--:(

Doug, there's nothing I have to put up, I'd have to get the data first. It would cost a few thousand bucks, or more, and take many hours, why waste my time?

There are really only 2 things I plan on doing before I head for Central America, file my suit and sell my stuff here. And of course finish up pending projects like Cap One. I'm NOT bored, sitting around wondering what to do.

As far as Fair Isaac goes, and since this topic is about PRIVACY, Fair Isaac actually does a great thing by reducing the credit reports to simple random numbers. The fewer people get to see the entire report, the better it is.

Would you want your potential employer to see that you filed for bankruptcy, have several judgments, tons of charge-offs, and two collection entries referring to well known local MENTAL hospitals?

Or would you rather have them see a random number?

Even if you have just ONE mental hospital collection and it was long paid and the rest of your credit is perfect, how is that going to effect someone's entire life?

I'm not a exactly a big fan of credit scores, but there ARE other extremely important issues.

given the fact that i've never been in a mental hospital, have a flawless credit history with no late payments in 15 years, and no other public entries or derogatories on my credit profile, and i can't refinance my house or buy any new properties because of my FICO score, i would much rather have lenders see my credit profile and make their decision based upon that, rather than the substandard scores {UN}fair isaac's quackware is giving me. this may not hold true for everyone, as an employer might deny a job applicant based upon a psychiatric history, even though this is illegal unless the condition will likely interefere with their normal work performance, or the applicant might pose a threat to themselves or others.

do we know whether or not FICO uses psychiatric hospitalization as a criteria for what you get for a score? probably not, but since nobody is allowed to see what goes into these scores, {UN}fair issac controls the financial freedoms and futures of nearly every consumer in america. if they openly call blacks and hispanics more risky than other ethnic groups, what do you think their position on mental patients would be? your guess is as good as mine.:(

Doug, you have to realize that your problems are VERY small compared to other peoples' who're struggling to feed the kids and pay the rent.

"given the fact that i've never been in a mental hospital, have a flawless credit history with no late payments in 15 years, and no other public entries or derogatories on my credit profile ..."

I'd say, count your blessings. It could happen to you too.