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Monthly Archives: June 2008
Credit isn’t only about your score
Your Lifestyle May Hurt Your Credit
Lenders may be monitoring your bar tab or marriage counseling bill—which could be costly for consumers
Most borrowers know a late payment or high outstanding balance can hurt their credit. But what about frequenting a massage parlor, retreading a tire, or visiting a marriage counselor? Such activities count, too, according to a suit filed by the Federal Trade Commission in federal court in Atlanta on June 10 against card issuer CompuCredit (CCRT).
Lenders, insurers, and other financial firms use credit scoring systems to make a host of decisions about consumers, including the interest rate on their mortgages, the limits on their credit cards, and the monthly premiums for their auto coverage. Some rely heavily on FICO, a three-digit score developed by Minneapolis-based financial firm Fair Isaac, while others use proprietary models developed by statisticians. But companies don’t disclose what’s baked in to their formulas, leaving many borrowers to wonder which factors determine their financial fate. The FTC suit against Atlanta-based CompuCredit for allegedly “deceptive” marketing practices offers a rare look inside the opaque business of credit scoring. It reveals a mechanism that consumer advocates and politicians have long suspected exists—one in which purchasing behavior, not just payment history, matters.
The allegations, in part, focus on CompuCredit’s Aspire Visa, a subprime credit card for risky borrowers. The FTC claims that CompuCredit didn’t properly disclose that it monitored spending and cut credit lines if consumers used their cards at certain places. Among them: tire and retreading shops, massage parlors, bars, billiard halls, and marriage counseling offices. “The company touted that cardholders could use their credit cards anywhere,” says J. Reilly Dolan, assistant director for financial practices at the FTC. “What they didn’t say was that you could be punished for specific kinds of purchases.” The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is also seeking $200 million in penalties from CompuCredit in the matter.
It’s not the first time CompuCredit has come under scrutiny from authorities. In 2006, the credit card issuer and another financial firm agreed to fork over $11million to consumers and reform its marketing and billing procedures as part of a settlement with then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who had launched a probe the year before after receiving various consumer complaints.
CompuCredit maintains that the FTC’s lawsuit is without merit, and defends its practices. “Every time a consumer accesses their credit, a new decision to extend a loan is being made,” says Rohit H. Kirpalani, CompuCredit’s general counsel. “These scoring models are commonplace across the industry.”
GAMING THE SYSTEM
With competition increasing, databases improving, and technology advancing, companies can include more factors than ever in their models. And industry experts say financial firms increasingly are looking at consumer behavior, as CompuCredit did. The worry is that companies may tweak the credit scoring systems in unfair or biased ways, weeding out or limiting borrowers based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. (In the case of CompuCredit, regulators are taking issue with the lack of disclosure, not specifically its use of behavior-based scoring.) “We as consumers should become aware that behavior is used to determine our creditworthiness,” says consumer advocate Karen Gross, president of Southern Vermont College. “What CompuCredit portends is the [use] of information to create a more robust and potentially nefarious credit scoring system.”
Silver-Greenberg is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com
Curb Appeal Check List
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Teddy Roosevelt
Amen! Verified by Snopes http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/troosevelt.asp The year is 1907. Over one hundred years ago. READ ROOSEVELT QUOTE UNDER THE PICTURE Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas on Immigrants and being an American in 1907. ‘In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.’ Theodore Roosevelt 1907 Every American citizen needs to read this! KEEP THIS MOVING