Dear Readers,
I hope your July is running smoothly.
This is a must-read story, for several reasons.
First, it highlights how the credit bureaus provide different credit reports with different information to their subscribers than they provide to consumers.
Second, and even more important, …it shows the credit bureaus receiving information from government agencies such as US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (“OFAC”). OFAC is one government tool for tracking terrorists and drug traffickers, so if one gets one’s name on an OFAC list, it is tantamount to being accused of terrorism or drug trafficking.
Problem is, as with so many problems with the credit bureaus, they have lax standards for adding an OFAC alert to someone’s credit report, so it can, and does, get added to the wrong person’s credit report. That’s a disaster for the person wrongfully accused. And, since it does not show up on the consumer version of the credit report, it may go undetected for months or years, all the while the consumer’s credit gets trashed.
Here’s the article…and, by the way, my friend Jim Francis of Philadelphia was the lead attorney in this case. He did an excellent job for his client as well as for public awareness.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/07/colo-womans-credit-report-falsely-labeled-her-a-terrorist/#.UAcP70r–5Q.facebook