I think racketeering might be closer? From Wikipedia:
> Originally and often still specifically, racketeering refers to an organized criminal act in which the perpetrators fraudulently offer a service that will not be put into effect, offer a service to solve a nonexistent problem, or offer a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket.
No. You can give the CRA money, and they will take it, gladly, but this doesn't change the credit data they hold about you, which says (for example) that you skipped out on all the utility bills at a place you owned 18 months ago.
I've sat in on calls from consumers to a CRA when I worked there. The typical thrust of the call is that the caller believes they are a good person and so the records of them doing stuff creditors won't approve of should be purged, the CS agent explains that they can purge anything if the consumer sends them proof it is wrong, for example if the record says somebody went to County Court and secured a judgement against them for £800 then a letter from the court saying "Whoops, our bad, we wrote Michael Smith, 43 from Leicester in this judgement but we meant somebody else entirely" will get that erased from their record. But just calling and moaning about how you really wanted to buy a new car but your credit is bad doesn't change anything.
I didn't see any sign there was a way to short cut any of this by paying for credit reports. I guess if you don't remember all the times you didn't pay your bills then a web site that lists them is handy? But that seems like that's on you.
I actually had reports from all the big CRAs in my country, and the best ones (with the most comprehensive coverage, so, Experian, who also happened to be my employer at the time) basically just say this guy seems to pay for some basic utillities and he pays on time. And that's it. The worst ones are like "This guy exists, and we don't have good data so shrug".
The best way to begin "fixing" your credit? Which all of these companies will recommend, but it's no big secret at all? Register to vote.
Creditors prefer to lend to people who actually exist. Governments don't want people who don't exist voting. So register to vote and immediately confidence that you're actually a real person, with a postal address, shoots up.
The next step is easy for me but apparently lots of people find it almost impossible. Pay bills! Got a phone? Agree to pay the phone company to use the phone and then... actually pay them for it. Again, your credit worthiness shoots up because creditors want to get paid, and showing you have some idea how to actually do that part is a good sign.
Now, if you're trying to persuade somebody to lend you Ferrari 488 money on a Fiat Uno income, those two basic tips won't get you there. You're going to need to learn how to manage exactly the right levels of debt, what's recorded and what isn't, lots of tricks. But I assure you that you aren't going to learn that stuff by paying a CRA, because it's like learning how to clip out of bounds in a video game, the designers of the game don't even understand it well.
I only skimmed this comment but it doesn’t seem to do anything to address the fact that CRAs do make mistakes on credit scores and if you pay for “credit monitoring” they will catch those mistakes.
> if you pay for “credit monitoring” they will catch those mistakes.
If you suppose that paying for credit monitoring will cause them to catch mistakes somehow, you'd need to show that.
If your assumption is that the CRAs don't care about mistakes unless you're paying them you need to think again, the value the CRAs had before any of this existed was that they could give a lender valuable intelligence about whether you might pay them. Lenders pay them for that, if the intelligence is often bogus the lender is wasting their money.
No. The proposition is, we'll show you the data we have.
Which is the exact same as what the law already requires (if you ask, free once per year in the US I believe) them to do, but of course the law doesn't require a snazzy web site with animated dials and explanatory videos.
If you're the sort of person who found it easier to get a few hours of exercise every week once they had a device telling them "You've only done 14 minutes of exercise today. That's not on track", then a credit monitoring service might be just the thing you need to actually pay off those cards on time and get your credit back into shape. But if you didn't buy that Fitbit, but did the same exercises, you'd get just as fit - and if you didn't buy credit monitoring but looked after your credit you'd find it easier to qualify for more credit.
So, having the monitoring might cause you to catch mistakes somebody made, and if you do you can inform them of the problem and they'll fix it (if you have documentary evidence) but it doesn't really change their actions compared to people who don't buy monitoring.
If you're thinking, wait, then why do they give you free credit monitoring when a big company loses your data? The answer is, because CRAs had existing sales people in those big companies, and when the big companies wanted to buy something to give peace of mind to people whose data they'd lost, "free credit monitoring" was on offer. Selling them something that actually helps is trickier, and what does it really mean exactly to actually help anyway?
I worked on a product like that, but it wasn't an easy sell. And for most users it seems exactly like it doesn't do anything. Like owning a Carbon Monoxide alarm. It seems to be working, but it doesn't actually go off, because you don't actually have a Carbon Monoxide leak, so... It's unclear what the online equivalent of the reassuring "I have power and am working" LED is, let alone the "Push to test" button. But outfits like Experian are aware that some kind of actual "Do bad guys actually have my stolen data and if so what do they have?" service is a better fit for those "data loss => free credit report" scenarios which is why they acquired the company I worked for when we were doing this.
The problem is that the credit bureaus can and regularly do make mistakes, or the creditors reporting data to them do, and when $shady_business says someone owes him thousands of dollars despite said debt not existing, or when someone steals your identity because the credit bureau has laughable security, the burden of proof is on the accused.
