If you were turned down for a loan — or were told your score required you to pay higher interest — from mid-March through early April of this year, you might want to find out if they used Equifax to run your credit report.
Equifax Inc. provided inaccurate credit scores on millions of U.S. consumers seeking loans during a three-week period earlier this year, according to bank executives and others familiar with the errors.
Equifax sent the erroneous scores on people applying for auto loans, mortgages and credit cards to banks and nonbank lenders big and small—including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co. and Ally Financial Inc., the people said. The scores were sometimes off by 20 points or more in either direction, the people said, enough to alter the interest rates consumers were offered or to result in their applications being rejected altogether.
The inaccurate scores were sent from mid March through early April, the people said. The company began disclosing the errors to lenders in May, they said.
Equifax said it has since fixed the error, which the company described as a “technology coding issue.” The glitch didn’t alter the information in consumers’ credit reports, the company said.
“We have determined that there was no shift in the vast majority of scores during the three-week timeframe of the issue,” Sid Singh, president of Equifax’s U.S. Information Solutions, said in a statement. “For those consumers that did experience a score shift, initial analysis indicates that only a small number of them may have received a different credit decision.”
Yeah, I don’t think I’d take any credit-reporting agency’s word for it, but especially not Equifax.
You can read the rest of the Wall Street Journal article here.