I’m sorry, your time’s run out! What do we have for the losers, judge? Well, for our defendants, it’s a lifetime at exotic Fort Leavenworth! And, for defense counsel Kaffee, that’s right, it’s a court martial! Yes, Johnny! After falsely accusing a highly decorated Marine officer of conspiracy and perjury, Lieutenant Kaffee will have a long and prosperous career teaching… typewriter maintenance at the Rocco Globbo School for Women! Thank you for playing “Should we or should we not follow the advice of the galactically stupid!”
Lt Kaffee — “A Few Good Men”
After a recent trip down the harrowing Memory Lane of Credit Bureau PTSD, I had taken some time to dispute some of the egregious errors in my credit report profile on the three credit bureaus.
The dispute process seemed far easier than I remembered it the last time I had to go through this exercise which was a three-year sentence of frustration and tears with no reduction for proving myself innocent to those credit bureaus that had presumed me guilty thanks to an identity thief who .
That feeling of “well, that was shockingly easy” should have been my first warning sign that one of the credit bureaus would throw a spanner in the works of happiness and it didn’t really come as a surprise that Equifax was the one that did it.
In fairness, they did agree with most of the disputed items and theoretically they’re going to be removed from the credit report.
But the one item they decided to be complete idiots about is the spelling of my name!
Now, I can’t exactly do much about the fact that even though I’ve lived all but 1-2 years of my life in the south…I’m still stuck with the northern spelling of my first name and there were times that people I was very close to would spell it wrong (which is actually a deadly insult in Hungarian culture) so I’m well past the desire to send my sword to those who would so dishonour the name as an invitation that they use the sword upon themselves and make themselves more useful to the world.
Yeah…that spelling in the south really sucks. But for what it’s worth, it got infinitely cooler when Mom shared that the original choice of my first two names would have been “George Lemuel” in homage to my grandfathers and then it really rocked when one of the stars of the 1970’s buddy cop show “CHiPs” spelled his first name the correct way and let’s just say Erik Estrada was rocking cool.
The interesting thing though is that no legitimate creditor I’ve had in the decades I’ve been trapped in the Phantom Zone known as a credit report has ever *USED* that spelling of the name and thus would have never reported that spelling to any of the credit bureaus.
I doubt Equifax will actually admit to the real reason they decided to make the wrong spelling of my name the primary name they use to identify me in the credit file but I suspect it was probably piss-poor handling in their back-end database of a credit enquiry fishing for potential victims for a pre-screen credit offer with the wrong spelling of the name.
Somehow, their database must have gotten the idea that the new spelling of the name it encountered was report worthy and then made it primary when they sorted the various name records in ascending order.
But given the process I’ll be describing below that they’re trying to inflict upon me to correct this error that they definitely caused of their own volition, it begs the question of why Equifax didn’t think to ask questions of the data source that supposedly reported this spelling of the name to them and demand that they validate the name they’re reporting with documentation proving its validity!
Anywho, I disputed that item (amongst others) on their website and it asked me to upload a document from the list that they provided and I chose my passport card as the most convenient one:
I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that over half of that list of supposedly acceptable documents do not mention or even have the full Social Security Number (SSN) listed on the document…that will become important in a bit.
The upload proceeds, the dispute is filed and even though FCRA allows them 30 days…it only took them 1 day to actually process it.
Yay!
Or so I thought until a letter from Equifax arrived yesterday in the mail with the ominous phrase “because the information you provided as proof of your identity does not match the information we currently have on your credit file” and then demands that I send them two documents…one for identification that shows the full nine-digit SSN and one showing the current address.
And they want me to put that in the post and mail them to their well-known address in Atlanta?!?!?
As “galactically stupid” suggestions go, this seems to be absolutely over-the-top lunacy and idiocy in one convenient package!
I realise that their corporate philosophy is to have zero f***s to offer their unwilling “customers” whose information they hoover up into these massive databases which often contains inaccuracies or worse because their vetting of the quality of the data they’re receiving is nonexistent at best.
But you’d think a company that had to pay a massive settlement for an even more epic data breach in 2017 would be a bit more sensitive to at least trying to make it hard for the people looking to steal identities! But in the case of Equifax, you’d be completely wrong.
Their demand for the full nine-digit SSN is not only ludicrously stupid and dangerous, it’s also something they are bound by their own policies as well as Federal Trade Commission regulations to never do whenever they put anything in the post to the consumer. Any report they mail must have the masked SSN with at most the last four digits (which is still dangerous but the ship sailed on the industry ever acknowledging that ages ago).
So naturally I wanted a bit of a chin wag with their “customer service” to ask if there was a more secure online way to give them what they want (and also in a way they can’t conveniently “lose” which Equifax in particular has a notoriously bad reputation often requiring the poor victims having to deal with them to send things multiple times and get the runaround by their phone agents).
Those phone agents who are clearly based off-shore (as evidenced by the heavily Bangalore-influenced accent of the person who answered the phone and slavish devotion to their script) and you can imagine just how much confidence this instilled in me.
Robot gets it! 😉
After three attempts to get the guy to understand what was going on and the fact I was extremely uncomfortable with the idea of posting anything with my full SSN for anyone to intercept along the way, I’d like to say that he was understanding and receptive of my concerns and suggested an alternative that would be workable.
I’d like to but no, that’s completely not the course of action he chose.
At which point I’m hanging up because my mother and sister had arrived in the car park and helping my mother do some nerding at Worst Buy was far more interesting than talking to a script jockey who doesn’t know a certain substance from Shinola.
Rose: ”You know, back in Minnesota, I was known as the Sherlock Holmes of St. Olaf.”
Dorothy: ”Figured out which one was Shinola, did you, Rose?”
Rose: ”The hard way.”
“Golden Girls”, Season 7 – Episode 2
So now I’ve got a bit of a quandary…
Part of me has the morbid curiosity of ringing them up this morning to see if I still get the call centre in Karnataka state or if I get someone equally useless in Atlanta but the other part of me is thinking just dispute the name again and upload the documents from both of their lists in their letter and see if it works without kicking out a another letter of galactic stupidity.
I am genuinely curious how they could have swapped the primary name on the credit file when no actual creditor ever reported that spelling but I’m much less confident I’ll get a truthful answer that they’re just hopelessly incompetent.
Hmmm…decisions, decisions.
I think I’ll go for the path of theoretically least resistance and try the pared-down dispute as I’m really not particularly interested in wrecking this particular day with any more abject stupidity than the normal level.
Stay tuned… 🙂