The FTC has a site with a lot of helpful information on helping you resolve identity theft, and even will help generate the correct documentation and direct you through the maze.
https://www.identitytheft.gov
Note the it is literally the business of credit agencies to blithely ruin lives so they will be very unhelpful if they can.
Huge differences in quality between your first and second paragraphs. It is the business of credit agencies to serve as proxies of your credit worthiness. They prosper when more people are in the credit pool and are able to take out loans.
Do you live in the United States? In the United States:
Where you live affects your credit worthiness.
Illegal, and radioactively so. The practice was called redlining and a bank engaging in it would have hellfire rained upon it.
Marital status affects your credit worthiness.
Also illegal.
The degree and school you attended affects your credit worthiness.
Untrue; credit reports don't include this information. (It is available from specialized vendors for doing things like e.g. verifying resumes, but banks don't habitually employ them because your credit history is much, much more reliable.)
The title of your job affects your credit worthiness.
Untrue; titles are generally not reported to CRAs, difficult to get out of customers, and difficult to verify. If you wanted to use them in underwriting, for the same amount of effort you can just ask "What is your salary?" and verify it with the employer the same way you'd verify their title; this gets you everything you want in a more reliable fashion, since salary inflation is less common than title inflation.
Yes, we moved here after 15 years of living abroad.
> Marital status affects your credit worthiness.
They asked for this information.
To paraphrase our mortgage broker, "having a 4 year degree makes you much more creditworthy." And I just confirmed it with a family member who works in Fannie Mae, says it's true.
Have you looked at a 1003/residentialloan application lately? You and I both agree they shouldn't be asking these questions but those questions are on the application.
To paraphrase our mortgage broker, "having a 4 year degree makes you much more creditworthy." And I just confirmed it with a family member who works in Fannie Mae, says it's true.
This is absolutely untrue, and I'd have to assume that your family member's role does not require an understanding of this.
Edit: It's also not on form 3001, so I'm not sure what your last sentence is trying to say.
statistics done by machines on past datasets can reveal a great deal about a population, regardless of how discriminatory, unfair or "bullshit", it may seem to a human.
Credit agencies don't prosper when more people are able to take out loans. They're not the agencies that actually provide credit and profit off interest. They prosper when their customers (credit-providing institutions) give them more business by running more credit checks, which is short-term correlated with the number of people who want to take out loans, regardless of result, and long-term correlated with them not providing false positives - not saying "Yes, this person is creditworthy" when they aren't and causing banks to go with another credit agency. The danger of false negatives is extremely long-term and tenuous: the only way that would be a problem is if they turn away so many people from credit that either people stop trying to get credit or that banks decide that credit is an unprofitable business and give up, neither of which seems likely to happen for the foreseeable future.
If credit agencies' business is just to serve as proxies of your credit worthiness, why is regulation of them necessary at all, since they'll always be consumer friendly?
That's a pretty weak argument. The existence of regulation - even heavy regulation - in an industry is not a barometer of their value to consumers.
But there are a lot of reasons why an industry who scores credit worthiness would be highly regulated, even if nothing had ever gone wrong (and plenty has). The main reason would be to ensure that score is applied in the same way to everyone, and that it isn't crafted in a way to create extreme disparities based on things like sex, race, religion, etc.
Note the it is literally the business of credit agencies to blithely ruin lives so they will be very unhelpful if they can.