I’m not sure if this is really true or not, but it appears to be. Check out this article about credit triggers. It’s on a political site but I also found information on NPR about it. (You can find those links in the first article).
Basically Experian can sell your information to creditors that allow them to keep track of your credit activities in real time. For people in debt, this means that as soon as you have new activity on your credit, the collectors may come calling rapidly.
For those of us that have good credit, it means that other lendors may see our inquiry in to a new mortgage or other credit and start bombarding us with offers via the phone etc to try to get our business. I haven’t experienced this but I think I’m going to do a bit more research on it. If it’s true, I think it’s wrong for Experian to do this. I want some control over who gets to look at my credit!
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/6/24/7591/57004
What do you think?
If you’re one of the lucky ones to get bombarded w/a lot of credit card offers, then your credit is pretty good. Fortunately, you can opt out of receiving these unsolicited offers by going to this website: www.optoutprescreen.com
This is true. I used to work for Experian.
The triggers are mainly used for account monitoring. Instead of assessing your credit (risk profile) once a month, quarter, or year, they can assess it in pseudo-realtime. While this seems like a bad thing for you, it’s a great thing for them– they can more accurately keep tabs on your creditworthiness and adjust their rates/terms accordingly. It makes sense from a lending perspective to have access to this tool.
If I recall correctly, Experian can only give this realtime information to your current lenders– not just anyone. So you won’t get bombarded for offers based on yesterday’s inquiry, but you may get a call from a current lender that wants your business in other areas, or you may get a rate or limit increase/reduction based on changes in your profile.
The credit bureaus sell your name all the time. They do prescreening for new offers based on credit history, effecively providing a client with a list of targets for advertising. They don’t, however, do this in realtime, at least not to my knowledge.