The newest abuse of your credit information

In a recent post I talked about the ugly truth that credit bureaus are selling your information when you inquire about a mortgage. This information including your name, address and phone number are sold to other mortgage brokers as a lead. So when you have your credit "ran" with a broker or bank that you are comfortable working with your phone starts to ring with people who have bought this information from the credit bureaus. I think the fact that they sell this information is despicable, and should be illegal.

Well, always the capitalists, the credit bureaus have come up with a brand new lead for us in the industry to buy. Again all of your personal information is for sale to as many people interested in paying for it. The new lead? Default leads. You can buy, for less than $0.10 per record, the credit header information of all the people that went 30 days late on their mortgage.

That’s right – if you’re late on your mortgage for one payment this information is now for sale to mortgage brokers and other lenders. So if your phone starts to ring when you miss a mortgage payment, you know where its coming from. Your friendly neighborhood credit bureau is selling information about your misfortune to whomever wants to pay for it. Bad news.

Information on how to keep this information from being sold:

What can you do to protect your credit data and not having it fly around the internet to the people that use these trigger leads?
You can force the credit agencies not to sell your credit data as a lead. Do this by going to: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
or by calling 1â??888-567-8688. I highly recommend doing this as soon as possible. If anyone calls you unsolicited while you’re in the process of refinancing tell them thanks but no thanks.

More links about trigger leads (hat tip: Matt Heaton):