@Anonymous wrote:
Read The Hill article HERE.
Just a snippet:
"... LendEDU analysis shows that Equifax was the subject of 30,576 CFPB complaints across the United States. Equifax was the most complained about company in each state but North Dakota, where rival credit bureau Experian took the top spot. ..."
Are you surprised? I'm not. By far, I've found EQ to be the absolutely worst of the 3 big CRAs by FAR to work with.
Equifax used to be really easy to deal with. I remember you could even just call them on the telephone and they would remove any inquiry you wanted. Those were the days.
Now, I don't think there's any doubt that they are the most incompetent large data aggregator. The most recent data breach speaks to that.
But, there are several other ongoing issues with Equifax:
The Equifax online system takes several minutes to load anything, and oftentimes locks you out of even accessing monitoring products that you're already paying for, when no discrepancy exists.
I'm not sure if companies are just deliberately not subscribing to Equifax, or if Equifax just cannot keep track of data; but I've noticed over the years that a lot of positive tradelines simply don't show up as reporting on Equifax. This can be used to your advantage; but, sometimes you just want to see that your positive tradelines to report timely, much less, at all.
Equifax oftentimes ends up generating multiple unique credit files for individuals; as opposed to Experian, who is really good at keeping all of the data under one umbrella, namely by attaching other addresses to tradelines... which makes it easier to investigate the source of discrepancies.
Speaking of which, if you ever get anything fraudulent removed from your Equifax history, it may inadvertently reappear later, after you have removed the fraud alert, in order to resume normal activity.
Equifax cannot seem to remember anything, not even for 24 hours. They are always asking for documents, even when you are looking at an Equifax report from the same day, devoid of any personal information discrepancy.
Perhaps there is a cultural barrier when communicating with overseas agents. They just don't seem to grasp the jist of how to internally investigate their own internal discrepancies; instead favoring scripts and just placing to onus on the consumer to resend their personal documents, for really no reason at all. If someone is in their system for decades... why would they ever need this, unless Equifax lost something of their own accord?
Their executive office used to have a direct number. But, I think they got rid of that... because people were overwhelming them, once they realized that they could actually contact an agent that generally knew what they were doing.
Transunion has been known to ignore disputes. But, filing a complaint will encourage them to do their job.
Experian charges for a credit lock. But, I don't think you can get locked out of your own access, as long as you have a recent report number.
But, Equifax is just all around bad news. They are thoroughly incompetent, and then have the nerve to place the onus on consumers to constantly help them figure out their own incompetence.
That said, it's not exactly difficult to dispute things off of the Equifax report. The real problem is trying to get them to aggregate and report all the things that are actually legitimate.
Equifax publishes wholly incomplete credit reports, at best.
