I have always been very curiously interested about companies that offer something for “Free” online. I suppose this started when I started seeing a number of outfits offering “free” credit reports after the FACT act of 2003.

Sometimes, I wondered how these institutions worked, and what marketing-pertinent information was sold to cover the development, management, and employee salaries to allow such a website to exist.

However, buried in the terms and conditions, people’s information was used, abused, and provided to third parties. Part of these fly-by-night operations was perhaps due to the difficulty of procuring a copy of a credit report exasperated by Experian/TRW/Eqifax.

But lo-and-behold, small companies showed up who knew how to get a copy of a credit report. Their price? Your privacy. And by privacy, I mean that many of these companies shared your credit information with other companies.

Did you get a free credit report and your credit score above 700? Well, many of these unscrupulous companies would share your information with a third party according to their terms and conditions.

But companies such as Adaptive Marketing are the least of our worries.

Let me introduce you to a little outfit called Experian. Experian is the worst of the worst. You may recognize Experian as the company with the obsessant ads and has the guy with the banjo, FreeCreditReport.Com.

I am convinced that Experian is the worst company on the face of the planet and has literally no regard for anything other than profit.

Let me explain:
Recently, Experian acquired a company called Talix, which owns “TheWorkNumber”. TheWorkNumber is a service company that positions itself as an outsourced HR service company that does things such as background checks, credit checks, and even mails W2 forms for around 70+% of the Fortune 1000.

Many companies choose to use TheWorkNumber because it simplifies HR costs, and when a company needs to verify employment, it shifts costs from an HR expense to a requester expense, as requests have to be paid by the requestor. TheWorkNumber collects somewhere around $5-15 per unique SSN.

Information TheWorkNumber provides includes SSN verification, address, date of hire, date of termination, salary, last title, and any other recent pings to your credit report by third parties.

Many of these sound like reasonable services to HR folks prior to interview, right?

Well, recently, Experian’s Richard Heath, that last month claimed his highest collegiate level of attainment was in Florida, owns a business within Experian to market your private information to collection agencies under a new program called “Go Collect”.

Now there are multiple problems with this. Experian seems to have taken liberties with it’s original business charter to include marketing all of Experian information to bill collectors.

If you’re like me, and tend to work for Fortune 1000 companies, TheWorkNumber has all your information available.

So hear this, Richard Heath, Senior Credit Risk Consultant at Equifax, class of 1988 and member of Theta Chi Fraternity:

Richard, your little playground pushed me into Chapter 7, and if I ever, ever, ever, run into you, I will kick your ass like the little pussy you are and fully pay for Dave Ingram’s plane ticket so he can watch.

…and you call yourself a credit and risk consultant.

Fuck you.