How safe is your personal information?
So, you go to apply for a home loan or an auto loan and they pull your credit. Then you go home and that night you calls from 3 or 4 different mortgage companies or auto companies saying that they know you are applying for a mortgage or an auto loan and they can give you a better deal. They rattle off all kinds of personal information that you though you had given only to the person who originally pulled your credit. How did they know?
The bureaus – Trans Union, Equifax and Experian are selling your personal information. When credit is pulled for a mortgage loan the codes that the credit is pulled with show that it is being pulled for a mortgage purpose and sends a "trigger" to the bureaus. These triggers are compiled on a minute by minute basis and resold as "trigger lists" to brokers who have contracted to buy them. While they don’t actually give a social, they do give a lot of other information. They may show a range of credit scores, or that you currently have a mortgage or the demographic you live in. These brokers can then, fairly easily, obtain your phone number and call offering you a better deal. Although usually it is not.
Is this right? In our opinion, no. There is various legislation under review to try to have this practice eliminated. As of now though, the FTC has classified it as legal.
What can you do about it? The best way to combat this is to "opt out". You can do this by calling 888-567-8688 or by going on line to www.optoutprescreen.com. It takes 5 days to go into affect so the best thing to do would be to opt out a week or so before the loan officer pulls your credit. The other benefit to opting out is that it will eliminate a lot of the junk mail you receive. The biggest benefit by far though is that it will prevent you from being put on a trigger list.
If you get phone calls from other brokers after you apply for a loan chances are what they are going to offer may not even be legitimate. You are best sticking with the loan officer you have and already trust. Remember, they do not have your social security number. Ask them not to call again and hang up on them. It is not the loan officer that is selling your information nor is it the third party credit reporting agency they pull credit though – it’s the 3 major bureaus that are assembling and reselling this information.
Play it safe and opt out – don’t get pulled into a possible scam that could end up costing you your home. Most mortgage brokers do not agree with the triggers program either. The best advice would be to not deal with one who does.
ML
