US Law (local/state/federal)

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This is the only decentralized venue for chatter about law in the US. Federal law and law of various states and territories is on topic here.

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The law that all US credit bureaus violate, bluntly, simply because there is no enforcement mechanism: data source disclosure (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The FCRA requires credit bureaus to disclose to consumers the identity of the sources of information in your credit file. Yet if you look at your credit report from any of the 3 major giants (TRU, EFX, EXPN), they list out all addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses with no indication of who fed them that info. If you request that info, they ignore or refuse.

The penalty for FCRA violations in that section is $1k. So you might think: “how cool is that? I can simply sue all three credit bureaus for $1k each”. It should work like that, but doesn’t. IIRC, it was a lawyer for a credit bureau who told me in so many words: case law shows that you must incur damages in this particular case. So if you can prove damages, then you can claim $1k (even if the actual damages are $1). But how do you even prove $1 in damages?

I have some ideas but generally this is such an uphill battle that credit bureaus can simply bluntly ignore the law. Which is what they do. It’s a good demonstration of how US corporations will plainly break laws that are unenforceable.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yes, but a scam is normally something that baits someone into a situation they fall prey to. The US credit system is certainly that, but it also exploits unwilling people who have no intent of taking the bait. That is, we cannot opt-out of the credit bureaus collecting data on us even if we try.