OK, I think I can now safely report that OptoutPrescreen.com is not a phishing scam. In fact, it probably is the best way for you to opt out from receiving preapproved or prescreened credit offers in the mail. But I still firmly believe that, in this era of rampant identity theft, it is an absolute disgrace that we have to opt out from having the credit bureaus so readily share our personal information in the first place.
Earlier this year I wrote a story about my own doubts concerning OptoutPrescreen and its privacy practices after I'd tried using it myself with only spotty success. I asked readers to let me know what kind of experiences they had with it, or whether the opt out phone number (1-888-5-OPTOUT) works better. And I was soon getting an earful, particularly from those whose suspicions about OptoutPrescreen were even stronger than mine.
The biggest problem was that the OptoutPrescreen.com website itself looked like an Internet scam artist cobbled it together over the weekend. "I went to the site and immediately noticed how amateurish it looked," wrote one reader. "The claim was made that it was a joint venture between the four major credit reporting bureaus. First of all, I think that if they had the support of the credit companies they would have better logos and probably hyperlinked to the company sites. I tried to send an e-mail to them and it was immediately returned undeliverable. On the privacy policy page there is a PO Box in Jacksonville, Florida for complaints, a PO box that is owned by 'Pamela and Romero Anderson.' This site definitely look phishy."
Since anyone suspicious of OptoutPrescreen was likely to find my story when they did a search, I started getting a lot of anxious e-mails from people who were afraid they had been scammed. Although I was pretty certain that OptoutPrescreen was indeed a joint effort of Equifax, Experian, Innovis, and TransUnion -- after all, there's even an FTC webpage recommending it that sounds just like the credit bureaus wrote it -- I had no way of contacting OptoutPrescreen directly to get answers to the questions raised about the site. So I started contacting the credit bureaus themselves to see if they could provide me a spokesperson for OptoutPrescreen. I didn't have much luck, but ultimately I was able to speak to a few folks who could at least give me some answers.
Yes, the credit bureau spokespersons confirmed, OptoutPrescreen.com is the official website for consumers to have their name removed from receiving what they call "firm" pre-screened offers of credit. (Just in case you don't already know, the only thing that's actually firm about these offers is the lender's insistence on its right to completely change the terms at its whim or just outright turn your credit application down, prescreening not withstanding.) The site is run by a third-party service vendor whom the spokespersons declined to name, but they said the vendor only transmits the opt-out requests on to the four credit bureaus and does not retain them in a database of its own. Name and address is the only information actually required to opt out, but your social security number, date of birth and other information is requested to increase the certainty of matching the opt-out request to the right person.
As for the suspiciously primitive look-and-feel of the website itself, the spokespersons dropped a few hints that a major overhaul was in the works and encouraged me to hold off to see if the changes addressed the issue readers and I had. The new site is now up, and I must admit that it is considerably more reassuring than the original. There are now real links to the four credit reporting agencies, a FAQ page, an improved entry form, and a privacy policy that's at least somewhat clearer than the previous one. Of course, there's also a lot of malarkey there about the benefits of having your mailbox stuffed with prescreened offers of credit, but I don't suppose we can blame the credit bureaus not wanting to encourage people to deprive them of revenue by opting out. And, gee, the only contact address is still a PO box in Florida.
So should you use OptoutPrescreen.com? From the reports I've gotten from readers, it would seem both it and the 888 5-OPTOUT phone number are about equally prone to sometimes not working on the first take. But, as happened with me, ultimately using one or the other does make a significant dent in the amount of junk mail you receive. My answer therefore is a reluctant yes -- use the website or the phone number, but you really should use one of them. Unfortunately, we don't have a better choice, because we are forced to opt out if we want to protect ourselves.
But I reiterate what I said back in April -- this whole process is very much bass ackwards. Why should we have to beg the credit bureaus not to sell our personal info to every untrustworthy financial institution that wants it? (And I definitely include the major credit card issuers in the untrustworthy category, but we'll be talking about that more at a later date.) Oh, and why don't the credit agencies want to identify the company that is actually handling our data? As we know all too well, third-party service vendors we've never heard of can and do wreak havoc with our privacy ... ChoicePoint, for example, which happens to be an Equifax spin-off. And CardSystems, another third-party service vendor, wasn't supposed to have retained the carelessly guarded credit card information that hackers were able to steal from its databases.
It's been said that every preapproved credit offer in your mailbox or your recycle bin is another identity theft waiting to happen. The default should be that we don't receive them until we're in the market for a credit card, loan, or insurance, and then we opt in to get the kind of offers we want to see. That would give the credit bureaus much hotter leads to sell, and maybe save a few trees in the bargain. OpoutPrescreen.com is better than it was, but it would be far better still if it were Opt-IN-Prescreen instead.
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