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.

  • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
    3·
    3 days ago

    But even if I trusted the current government to implement this with the right goals, I would never trust future governments not to abuse this system. I don’t think I’d really trust any sort of group to do this right. I’m already disappointed enough with our current democracy (in Canada) for not getting rid of first-pass-the-post, and I’m skeptical that much will change with interprovincial trade barriers (why not sooner?).

    Amen!

    But the idea of a better implemented credit score to track only severe abuse of debt doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to me. Obviously the current system is messed up and has major problems, but I feel like it could plausibly be fixed and done in a reasonable way. I think debt to buy a house (and maybe sometimes a car) is generally a good option to have. And I don’t know how you could offer this without tracking people who don’t pay. (Though maybe I’m wrong, maybe just going based off of income history is enough.)

    It’s funny because wealthy people don’t have this problem. They want a loan for several millions? No problem! If they can’t pay back the loan, it’s not their problem though. It’s the bank’s problem. But hey, let’s deny a loan for a lower-middle class worker for a $15k used car to get to work, or deny them the ability to have shelter because they fell on hard times once in their life ages ago.

    You know what I mean? Sure there should be a way to find out of a person is trustworthy to pay back a loan, but at the same time we shouldn’t be living in such an unfair system.