http://www.ispeech.org/text.to.speech
Ever had that feeling that someone is watching you?
Do you feel like you are living in a Big Brother world, where the average Brit caught on CCTV 300 times per day?
Earlier this week I had the same feeling; it was fortunately for a less sinister reason – my parents were on my mind and so I dropped them a quick message on Facebook – ‘hey, thinking of you, how are you’…that kind of thing. Awaiting their reply, the following day I received a hand-written letter from them, sharing what a great time they had with us on holiday several months back…spooky eh?
This ‘sixth sense’ experience is not limited to ‘red letter days’ with warm words from family members it seems. Take for example this article (my content & image source) from The Guardian dating back to 2008 with an innocuous looking building as the lead photo – how is that relevant to us property investors today? Well, it seems VERY!
Any property investor using mortgage finance should be aware that lenders undertake credit reference checks when we submit an application for a loan with them. Fair enough, right? Yes it is and if I ask you to name these credit reference agencies I bet you could name two if not all three. They are Experian (also known as Credit Expert), Equifax and the lesser-known Call Credit (who also have a free service called Noddle).
You may be aware that you can subscribe to a range of services from each of these providers and if you are really genned up, that you can obtain a copy of your credit file from them by avoiding the higher cost subscriptions and opting for the Statutory Credit Report costing £2 instead.
If you do not do anything else today, then I suggest you visit each of these sites and get your own report. However, I recently visited Noddle to get my free report from Call Credit and they said they could not identify me! I now have to write to them instead…but this in itself has me worried; how can they not identify me when I tell them my name, address and enter a credit card that I have…unless something is wrong of course?
That is where I am heading with this feature today – what if something is wrong? If something is wrong with the records held about us by these credit reference agencies – and different lenders use different agencies in their searches – then it could result in us refused credit, or offered worse terms. That is bad news for an investor that seeks to build their portfolio using mortgages.
I did in fact spot one problem on my Experian credit report one time. It contained what they call a ‘linked address’ in Stoke on Trent (a Déjà vu location as you will see later). A linked address is where an individual shows up elsewhere. Clearly, your home addresses for the past six years (how far back they go) will be there and that is no surprise. Nevertheless, I have not been to Stoke, let alone lived there since before the Britannia Stadium, home to Stoke City football club was built in 1997. Something odd about that then, so I followed the instructions within the report, contacted Experian and had this spurious linked address removed from my file. Perhaps it was a Stoke City fan ordering a new shirt from a catalogue company using a similar name, who knows? It was a good lesson for me to do this and now I get and check my reports from Experian and Equifax regularly.
I only came across Call Credit fairly recently and as I mentioned, when I tried to contact Noddle I drew a blank…perhaps my alter-ego from Stoke has been up to more tricks there…? I will send off my letter and £2 to them to find out.
OK, so pretty standard stuff so far, as most of you would agree I am sure. But it can get even more sinister…
There are three credit reference agencies right, WRONG! There is at least another one…
The fourth agency is called National Hunter, located in Stoke-on-Trent (spooky connection again) and was featured by The Guardian back in 2008, as I mentioned earlier. The irony is that in this article six years ago, a company representative said that they needed to become more transparent to the consumer…anyone heard of them in the past six years then?
The thing is, National Hunter are jointly owned by around 90 banks and financial institutions, all linking and sharing their data between each other using the National Hunter systems. Experian, following an acquisition from a software company a few years ago, manages the system. They hold information on consumers for up to six years with the purpose of fraud detection. They cross-match information across all the different financial applications that we make such as credit cards, bank account applications and of course mortgages. A discrepancy can lead to a suspicious note listed on our file, or even a statement that probable fraud exists…and we may never know! Even if we were turned down for credit, the most we are likely to get back from a lender is ‘check with the credit reference agencies’, which would lead us to the not-so-secret three mentioned.
The problem here is twin-fold as far as I am concerned:
1) Nobody even knows who National Hunter are, so cannot find them; and
2) The sharing of data idea is open to error and possible wrong classification of somebody as being fraudulent, when their greatest crime might be forgetting to include bonuses on one application, or getting the date they moved house wrong on another.
This is scary for me and the way the system works is where one lender notifies all the others via the central network. This means every member lender gets to see this potential erroneous information but even if we did know that National Hunter existed, how could we find out the info held and put right any wrongs such that ALL the different lenders updated their individual systems? I could be wrong but a healthy scepticism makes me nervous here.
The good news is that it is also possible to obtain a copy of the data they hold on us too. Follow the links provided, download the form called a Subject Access Request, send it with a hefty £10 fee to get a print out, wait 40 days and you should get a copy of your data file. I have not gone this far yet myself to tell you the next step in the event of any errors but I imagine there is a process.
If you are not scared witless by now I have more for you dear reader before you go…
Just check out this section contained on the new crowdfunder LendInvest’s website ‘SIRA system’, ‘Border Agency database checks’ and the high-tech sounding ‘geo-location searches’ are just some of the additional checks that they make on us. I am sure these checks are not restricted to this lender alone and I am also sure that there will be more that others use also…I did come across a Google map underwriting integration when doing some digging around earlier for this feature today, for example.
I know that if we have nothing to hide, then we also should have nothing to fear. I also know that fraud, identify theft and such like is a big problem that affects us as consumers as well as the financial institutions. That said, digital and analytical systems are not reputed to be error-free and if we add in a human error element to that…spanning across 90 or more different lenders using a system that nobody knows about…then it is not difficult to appreciate that we are indeed living in an Orwellian world now.
Just watch out, as Big Brother is watching you!