"Credit bureaus had the most complaints of all companies filed with the CFPB by consumers in 2018, with 34% of all complaints directed at Transunion, Equifax, and Experian that year."

Let's review some of them...

Equifax Experian TransUnion

Equifax

-On 2 August 2022, a week after its CEO Mark Begor was deemed "uniquely qualified to lead the Company" and was granted a $25 million dollar bonus package by Equifax's board, the Wall Street Journal reported that Equifax had sent millions of incorrectly-calculated credit scores to lenders.

-Equifax acknowledged reporting inaccurate credit scores, but insisted the errors had affected only a few people. The following day, a class-action lawsuit was filed by Jacksonville, Florida resident Nydia Jenkins against Equifax alleging she had received a "substantially pricier car loan" (resulting in an additional loan payment of $2,352 more per year) due to Equifax reporting her credit score 130 points off from what it should have been.
-Equifax was the subject of more than 57,000 consumer complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from October 2012 to September 17, 2017, with most complaints relating to incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, or misattributed information held by the company.
-In September 2017, Equifax announced a cyber-security breach, which it claims to have occurred between mid-May and July 2017, where cybercriminals accessed approximately 145.5 million U.S. Equifax consumers' personal data, including their full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver license numbers. Equifax also confirmed at least 209,000 consumers' credit card credentials were taken in the attack. On March 1, 2018, Equifax announced that 2.4 million additional U.S. customers were affected by the breach, increasing the number of affected to 147.9 million Americans. The company claims to have discovered evidence of the cybercrime event on July 29, 2017. Residents in the United Kingdom (15.2 million) and Canada (about 19,000) were also impacted. The vulnerability in which Chinese hackers leveraged was CVE-2017-5638, the hackers managed to stay in Equifax systems undetected for approximately 134 days.
-In March 2018, the Security and Exchange Commission accused Jun Ying, Equifax's former CIO, of illicit insider trading, by selling company stock before the breach was publicly disclosed. After an investigation by the FBI, Ying pleaded guilty, was sentenced to four months of prison plus a year of supervised release, and was fined $55,000.00 and ordered to pay restitution of $117,117.61 in June 2019.
-An Equifax manager, Sudhakar Reddy Bonthu, also pleaded guilty to insider trading and received a sentence of 8 months of home confinement.

Experian

-On 1 October 2015 Experian announced that they had discovered a data breach existing between 1 September 2013 and 16 September 2015. As many as 15 million people who used the company's services, among them customers of American cellular company T-Mobile who had applied for Experian credit checks, may have had their private information exposed.
-In 2020 it was revealed that Experian had suffered a further data breach, on this occasion in South Africa. Initially, Experian claimed that the incident had been contained but subsequently this was shown to be untrue. Data on 24 million South Africans was leaked, as well as on nearly 800,000 businesses. Of these, 24,838 had financial details leaked.
-In January 2021 a new leak was revealed in Brazil, with the source being linked to Experian's Brazilian subsidiary Serasa Experian. The breach resulted in data of 220 million citizens (including some already dead) being sold in the web. This is probably the most severe data breach in history, as it includes names, social security numbers, income tax declaration forms, addresses and other private information on nearly all Brazilian citizens. Experian claims there's no evidence that its systems have been compromised, but this lack of evidence doesn't explain it being the only probable source for the data. According to a Brazilian consumer rights foundation, the company has not been handling the breach appropriately

TransUnion

-In 2003, Judy Thomas of Klamath Falls, Oregon, was awarded $5.3 million in a successful lawsuit against TransUnion. The award was made on the grounds that it took her six years to get TransUnion to remove incorrect information in her credit report.
-In 2006, after spending two years trying to correct erroneous credit information that resulted from being a victim of identity theft, a fraud victim named Sloan filed suit against all three of the US's largest credit agencies. TransUnion and Experian settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. In Sloan v. Equifax, a jury awarded Sloan $351,000. "She wrote letters. She called them. They saw the problem. They just didn't fix it," said her attorney, A. Hugo Blankingship III.
-TransUnion has also been criticized for concealing charges. Many users complained of not being aware of a $17.95/month charge for holding a TransUnion account.
-In January 2017, TransUnion was fined $5.5 million and ordered to pay $17.6 million in restitution, along with Equifax, by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The federal agency fined the companies "for deceiving consumers about the usefulness and actual cost of credit scores they sold to consumers". The CFPB also said the companies "lured consumers into costly recurring payments for credit-related products with false promises". Credit bureaus had the most complaints of all companies filed with the CFPB by consumers in 2018, with 34% of all complaints directed at Transunion, Equifax, and Experian that year.
-In June 2017, a California jury ruled against Transunion with a $60 million verdict in the largest Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) verdict in history. The San Francisco federal court jury awarded $60 million in damages to consumers who were falsely reported on a government list of terrorists and other security threats. The plaintiffs' team of attorneys at Francis & Mailman, P.C. partnered with another California-based firm in the class action. Following up on this, in April 2022, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said TransUnion "incapable of operating its businesses lawfully"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransUnion

Mirrored at the Nerve Center as "Credit bureaus".

Categories: Class disparities, Double standards, Hypocrisy, Serious consequences, Trying to have it both ways