Equifax refused to restore his credit score or explain why it dropped to zero, until Go Public started asking questions.
Only then did the company point to its little-known policy: If a credit file sits inactive, the consumer may be labelled “unscoreable” and their score reset to zero. Tregear says the last time he checked, before it disappeared, his score was around a more respectable 700.
Go Public has since found a major flaw in consumer protection rules — that there are no laws or oversight on how credit scores are calculated, leaving credit bureaus to do what they want.
Consumer advocate Geoff White says that gives credit bureaus too much power, with no transparency.
Credit scores are a scam. I’ve been unemployed for a year and my credit score has never been higher.
I dont think employers report to credit bureaus. As long you arent late on bills, (or have none) than your score wont change.
That said, yeah they are a scam.
Surely this comes under the topic ‘Identity Theft’?
By reducing his score to zero, effectively wiping out his entire credit history, they have completely stolen his identity and taken it completely away from him?
If you fully pay off a debt that negatively impacted your credit, once paid, it should no longer hurt your score.
Credit scores should only be negatively impacted if you don’t pay it back, and they have to write it off or take collective action.
I have seen too many credit scores ruined by a few missed payments and its very silly.
There are time limits built in to the algorithm for calculating your score, that are there because of the agencies themselves and by legislation. Even the negative effects of a bankruptcy completely clear after a given amount of time. One suspects, in fact, if this person DID have negative factors affecting their credit, it would not have been reset to zero. There would have been a timer clicking away to keep feeding the account algorithm with fresh data.
I have seen too many credit scores ruined by a few missed payments and its very silly.
Very unlikely unless they already had a shaky credit history.
I closed my oldest credit card a bit ago, and it just dented my score by 30 for a few months before rebounding. I also missed a payment once (thought I had auto pay on, I didn’t) and as far as I remember it didn’t change my score.
Very unlikely unless they already had a shaky credit history.
The article says different.
I also missed a payment once (thought I had auto pay on, I didn’t) and as far as I remember it didn’t change my score.
You have to miss two payments (of any kind, not just a credit card) within a 12-month period for it to affect your credit score.
You have to miss two payments (of any kind, not just a credit card) within a 12-month period for it to affect your credit score.
Yes of course it would, why wouldn’t it? If they couldn’t recover/rebound from that, then their history is already iffy
This happened to my wife too. She had super high rating like whatever the highest is 790? 800? She bought a telus phone and plan. They didn’t have coverage where she lived, Telus blamed the phone, the phone manufacturer said it was the service carrier. She cancelled her account because she couldn’t use it, so they charged her $300 cancellation fee. She refused to pay so it went to collections. She negotiated with collections to pay it and restore her credit that was suffering. Whatever they did ended up being a complete reset to 0, we only found out when applying for a mortgage and they were like, no you have no credit at all, like you never existed.
The highest I think is 900, I’m capped at 835 because I don’t own a house.
The whole thing is a system to keep poor people poor.
Which is weird right. No debt, lower score
Debt = good little consumer = higher score
I have an ultra low interest rate car loan I’m keeping alive strictly for the credit score benefits.
It never goes to zero because of bad debt. Even bankruptcy will never take it to zero. There is something very remiss about the ‘facts’ that you are trying to convince us are true.
The bank said no credit at all. As if she had never started an account.
You read the article right?
When he checked his Equifax account, he saw his score had been wiped to zero — without warning or explanation.
I read the article. Did you? A bad credit rating did not take the account to zero. Poor credit history did not take the account to zero. Bad debt did not take the account to zero. An accounting mistake, or inaccurate credit information did not take the account to zero. Not paying bills on time did not take the account to zero. Defaulting on a loan or credit card did not take the account to zero. A court judgement did not take the credit rating to zero.
The fact that there was NO credit transactions at all, good OR bad, in two years meant the account was deemed ‘unscoreable’ - not good, not bad, not horrible, but non-existent. Absolutely no reportable data to form a credit rating on, for two years.
How can this post created in the ‘Canada’ community be cross posted into the ‘Canada’ community? Somehow the same post got ‘created’ twice in the same community.
Because you are not the customer. It doesn’t score for you, it scores the potential a lender can make money off of you.
Your response to my post makes absolutely no sense, unless you are a chatbot. My post has nothing to do with credit or a credit report, it has to do with a glitch in the coding of Lemmy itself. Two identical posts - posted at the same time by the same person using exactly the same URL and heading.
Scary, reading some of the posts herein, how some people (many?) have absolutely no idea how credit reporting agencies or your credit score actually work. The term ‘clueless’ comes to mind.
