I caught one of those protect your credit commercials in passing this morning and I’m not sure why I never made the connection earlier, but I just couldn’t help but thinking what a horrible scam those things actually are…
I mean, they’ve basically created a new product (credit monitoring) to help protect consumers from flaws in their original product (credit reports). Worse yet, because there’s no way to opt-out of having a credit report, per se, you’re pretty much at their whim to either subscribe to this service or just take your chances – a fact that they drive home to consumers with plenty of fear via their commercials.
Here’s a thought – if you’re going to create a huge list of all of my credit information and use it as the basis for which all other creditors decide whether or not they want to do business with me, it’s your responsibility to make sure that it only has information that actually pertains to me. Sure, creditors also need to be more scrutinous to ensure that they don’t award somebody with a car loan in my name unless they’re absolutely positive that it’s actually me, but even more so I think it falls on the guy maintaining the list to keep it legit … on his own dime.