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Comment by schemescape | Hacker News Reader

I’m still bitter that a credit reporting agency let my information get stolen, then offered free credit monitoring through Experian, and Experian just seems to be using this free monitoring for upselling.

Hopefully this fine exceeds the revenue they generated from all this…

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Experian once stole our credit card number, and wouldn’t stop making unauthorized charges to it.

Our bank was able to just block Experian, since Experian was a large percentage (“most”) of their fraud cases, and they didn’t want to pay to re-issue cards with new numbers.

That’s the sort of thing that should blow up on cnn for days on end…in a saner world.

Yes. This happened to me as well. I once paid them for something and realized they have been charging the card monthly silently.

A just punishment for Experian and other credit agencies is dissolution - these companies gain value purely through rent seeking and are publicly unaccountable while operating in an extremely important field. Either the costs of background checks should just be shifted directly onto banks or we should have a government run public ledger of defaulted debts.

They can wave off fines all day. Forbid them from sending marketing emails for 24 months. See if anyone keeps their job after that.

Now I think about it, this is a much better approach than a fine. Is there a downside to this?

The downside is that there's hardly any political will in the US to regulate businesses

Getting sued for "infringing upon their right to free speech," I'm sure.

No one is stopping them from mailing letters.

> Hopefully this fine exceeds the revenue they generated from all this…

Maybe if it were $650k per victim.

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