[gruez]

>Credit reporting agencies and financial institutions commit fraud all the time. They call it identity theft so that you think it is your fault instead of their fault. No one would care about a bank giving a loan to a person that was impersonating them except for the fact that the bank (credit card, mattress store, car dealership, etc) commits fraud and reports to the credit agency that you have defaulted on your loan when you have not.

That's literally what not fraud is.

>In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right

If some guy walks into a bank and claim they're you and they believe it, the banks aren't gaining anything. If anything, they lost money. Wrongly reporting the default to the CRAs also doesn't benefit them either; it's not like they compensate the banks based on how many default reports they send in. Finally, it's missing the "intentional" part. Lax security practices are negligence at best.

[njarboe]

Maybe a better way of say this is that the bank is committing libel when they report to a credit bureau that you have defaulted on a loan when you have not. They say you did something that you did not do and the fact of them declaring that lie does you damage. The important thing is that "identity theft" should be a problem for the entity that made the loan to a criminal and not the person that was impersonated. Call it "bank libel" when someones credit score is ruined by a bank that gives a loan to the wrong person and one is closer to describing the truth of the situation.

Edit: mindslight mentions in this thread that: "The 'Fair' Credit Reporting Act explicitly immunizes the surveillance bureaus against the tort of libel". Amazing.

[bsanr2]

>If some guy walks into a bank and claim they're you and they believe it, the banks aren't gaining anything.

They would have just sold a loan.

>If anything, they lost money.

Can't they sell the defaulted loan to collections?

>Lax security practices are negligence at best.

Systemic, known, and long-standing negligence speaks to intention.

[gruez]

>They would have just sold a loan.

Yeah, that's what their books say, but that doesn't necessarily match reality. In reality they gave $1000 in cash to someone, and their expected return on that is a fraction of that. Same logic if you bought paid $800 for bonds with face value of $1000, but unknown to you, the bonds are actually junk bonds with a expected value (factoring in repayment and default) of $500. In that case your paper gains are $200, but in reality you actually lost $300.

>Can't they sell the defaulted loan to collections?

They gave the bad guy a loan for $1000. They're out $1000. They sell the loan to collections for $300, they're still out $700.

>Systemic, known, and long-standing negligence speaks to intention.

Security exists on a spectrum, and there are trade-offs to be made. Clearly the banks don't have an interest in selling fraudulent loans, and putting up too much barriers when it comes to authentication also has costs.

[bsanr2]

Does... interest stop being a factor? They gave an x-year loan for $1000 at x% APR (was it subprime?). Also, penalties. Collections can go after you for the full amount. They buy it from the bank for the original $1000+.

Or, the loan hasn't defaulted yet. The bank suspects it will. They load it into a bundle, get it highly-rated, sell the bundle. They make a profit. A whole bunch of other people get hosed.

>Clearly the banks don't have an interest in selling fraudulent loans

This is the wrong decade to be making that statement.

[lotsofpulp]

> Can't they sell the defaulted loan to collections?

Why would anyone pay face value for a defaulted loan?