@Anonymous wrote:
And none of them at all contain more than a collection of stories about how one or another individual thinks it works. Then there is the federal legislation which established the whole opt out scheme and that seems to refute any claims that opting out can prevent a CA from receiving an alert over a credit profile change.
Actually, it's 'tribal knowledge' gained from experience, what we know of how, when & to whom the credit reporting agencies will sell lists of information, and the FCRA itself. In addition to that is the knowledge of how bad debt portfolios are bought & sold.
For the purposes of collection activity, we know that a collection agency must have "permissible purpose" to pull a consumer credit report. Section § 604. Permissible purposes of consumer reports [15 U.S.C. § 1681b] specifically outlines the situations where a credit reporting agency can furnish the credit report of a consumer. No other situations are allowed. Collection agencies don't actually have carte blanche to pull anybodys credit reports, any time that they want to. They' have to uniquely identify the consumer, first, to obtain the full report. But, CRAs sell all sorts or lists to just about anybody, for almost any purpose. Consumers who are not opted out can be "identified", for example, by a name and a partial SS# to gain access to slightly more information that's available for prescreened offers (e.g. demographic information), and to subscribe to "triggers"-- changes in consumer credit reports (improving scores, balance changes, INQs, new credit, etc...).
When massive debt portfolios are sold, there is frequenlty tons of missing information about the debtors, including definitively unique identifying information. Debt collection agencies frequently leverage names, similar names, knicknames, and partial SS#s to gain limited access to lists of people who might be debtors. Opting-out with the CRAs, and creditors in good standing stops the CRAs from including you in those lists for <ahem> marketing purposes. This makes it far less likely that a debt collector, compiling information on a debtor(s) will be able to leverage the CRAs to *find* and eventually uniquely identify an individual as the debtor. And, even if they're 99% certain that they're doing limited spying on the right person (unique name, demographies, etc...) they won't get notified of the individual who has suddenly decided to pay a bunch of old debt, or who's in the market for a new house, etc...
