The Hidden Truth Behind the Shady Credit Agencies That Can Ruin Your Life

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AlterNet / By Lynn Parramore

Are You Held Hostage By Bad Credit? The Hidden Truth Behind the Shady Credit Agencies That Can Ruin Your Life
How a billion-dollar industry’s mission transformed from assessing creditworthiness to chasing profits and holding consumers hostage.

November 29, 2011 |


Remember the old idiom, “Don’t become a statistic”? Well, you already are.

The Minneapolis-based Fair Issac Corporation, popularly known as FICO, keeps close tabs on your credit files and uses a secret formula to reduce that information to a number that can powerfully impact your life. If you pay a bill late, they know about it. When you use your credit card, they see it. They even know if you are making inquiries to learn about your credit score.

There’s also a lot they don’t know. Some things, like your race or marital status, are prohibited by law from being considered in credit scoring. Other things, like your employment history, where you live, or how much you’ve saved, don’t fit into the algorithms FICO uses. Any normal person might suspect they are relevant to assessing the quality of your credit, but they won’t make a difference in your score.

We are all living, breathing human beings, but big businesses and banks have turned us into half-baked statistics in order to grease the wheels of capitalism – wheels that often catch us in their spokes. At best these statistics are inexact; in many cases, they are much worse than that, with disastrous consequences for the humans they purport to describe. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/153256/are_you_held_hostage_by_bad_credit_the_hidden_truth_behind_the_shady_credit_agencies_that_can_ruin_your_life/