Credit Check- have you been scammed?

[NavyDiver]

Optus- Medibank.... as the list grows this may be more useful for all of us



"Credit reportUsually, you can access your report online within a day or two. Or you could have to wait up to 10 days to get your report by email or mail.Contact these credit reporting agencies for your free credit report:

Experian (https://www.experian.com.au/consumer/order-credit-report) 1300 783 684 (https://www.experian.com.au/consumer/order-credit-report)
illion (https://www.creditcheck.illion.com.au/) 132 333 (https://www.creditcheck.illion.com.au/)
Equifax (https://www.equifax.com.au/personal/products/credit-and-identity-products) 138 332 (https://www.equifax.com.au/personal/products/credit-and-identity-products)

Different agencies can hold different information. So you may have a credit report with more than one agency.
"

The cut and paste and links are from the Government web site

My Smart Money . Gov . AU Link in full is https://moneysmart.gov.au/managing-debt/credit-scores-and-credit-reports

Trivia- a person who earns a LOT more than me got a worse report? Stuffed if I know why.

[Homestar]

Credit reports are strange things indeed. If you rarely get loans your credit score can be quite low. Mine was great at one stage - now I have separated and have more disposable income to myself it’s gone down - go figure. Not that it matters as I’m not looking to finance anything in the foreseeable future.

[PhilipA]

As an Optus victim , they have paid for a one year sub to Equifax. They will inform me of any credit checks done on me by a company.

Seeing that the hackers do not have my licence card number or Medicare number or passport number, it would be difficult for someone to get credit in my name.

At least I hope that is the case as at first Optus said that they got my name , address, DOB,and email address then later said that My licence was also gone.

I put a freeze on credit checks for 21 days to see if the situation became clearer. You can do this even if you do not have an account and it is transmitted to all credit check agencies.

Anyway the main danger seems to be phishing, and we have had that problem for years as our email address was "pawned" years ago.
Regards PhilipA

[jon3950]

I had my identity stolen back in 2017 and I thought I'd sorted it out, until last year when I tried to connect my satphone. I had the connection refused because I had a bad credit rating, of which I was blissfully unaware. My identity was obtained when I had a bank statement stolen from my letterbox.

Got a credit report from Equifax (for free) and found out I owed American Express about $4k and someone had also taken out credit cards with Westpac in my name. Once I knew this it was very easy to get it removed and cost nothing. It's also worth mentioning that the phone service provider put me onto a mob who tried to charge me $2+k to do it for me, whereas fixing myself only took a couple of phone calls to Amex and Westpac who couldn't have been more helpful.

Cheers,
Jon

[Tote]

I've been using creditsavvy.com.au for a while to monitor my credit score, it doesn't give a full report but does email you each month with a credit score.
Regards
Tote

[DiscoMick]

The wife got a letter from Optus saying her licence details had been compromised. She is in the process of replacing it.
The annoying thing is she hasn't had an Optus account for 3 years, but apparently federal terrorism legislation requires telcos to keep account details for 7 years. Why?
Why can't these organisations collect identification details to verify identity, create that identity and then delete the details, so they are not a target? If they need to reverify, they can collect the details again.
This is the approach a cybersecurity expert for the Qld govt told me he recommends departments follow.

[3toes]

The credit score is a bit of a myth peddled by those who create them and are looking for ways to make a profit out of having your information.

Despite what they market it is very rare for a credit decision to be made on credit score high medium or low alone.

What they do create is a faster decision process which is cheaper to process than actually looking at the customer. In doing this the trade off is a higher level of bad debt than a more manual process. They work on the basis that the lower acquisition cost outweighs the higher bad debt and lost good customers

The UK which is the global experiment to see what happens if you keep allowing these companies access to more and more information. In Australia you are seeing the introduction of this and the customer no longer having a relationship as everyone who looks at your credit report has all the information. Once this was spread across multiple organisations who each valued that information about customers as corporate gold

What it has been proven is that scoring creates an under class of people who are locked out of the financial system. You have to fit in the box that the scoring company has created. In the UK this is somewhere between 10 and 20 percentage of the population

Also remember they are sorting and selling your information to many companies as marketing information and to government for analysis. They will package you based on age, type of income, employment status, location, home owner etc