John Oliver gave credit check companies a taste of their own incompetence when he created a series of fake websites to highlight the number of errors routinely found on credit reports.
TransUnion, Equifax and Experian, the three major credit check providers, claim that their reports are accurate 95 percent of the time.
So Oliver and his staff set up websites for Equifacks, TramsOnion, and Experianne, each offering a weird service. Experianne, for example, will send people to your home to whisper passages from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” into your child’s ears. And so long as 95 percent get the right website the first time, it’s OK, right?
According to Oliver, 25 percent of credit reports issued by the three major companies that compile such reports contain serious errors. A woman named Judy Thomas had to fight for six years to prove she was not Judy Kendall, who had racked up significant debt in Utah.
Another woman kept getting denied for various services because her credit report had her listed as deceased. During a news interview featured on Oliver’s show, she confirmed she was not in fact dead.
The three major companies also market themselves to employers, claiming that credit reports are good indicators of future job performance.
But Oliver played video of an Oregon legislative hearing during which a representative from TransUnion admitted that there is no data to back up any correlation between credit score and job performance.
Oliver then showed the industry report which claimed that 95 percent of all credit reports are accurate, at which point he made a startling comparison.
“When you are holding records for more than 200 million individuals, that 5 percent error rate affects 10 million people,” he said. “They’re basically saying, ‘Great news everyone, we only f–ked up a group equivalent to the entire population of Sweden! We’re the f–king greatest!’”
Watch the video above.
