GOLDEN RULES
■ Keep a close eye on your accounts, monitor your credit file ■ Be very cautious in your e-commerce
■ Research howto spot suspicious emails, texts and calls industry code,’’ Clark told me.
Thiswas, he said, required by our anti-money-laundering laws already.
Confusing stuff. It almost seems like some BNPL lenders are not meeting their legal obligations.
Our ordinary lives are increasingly digital. This brings huge opportunities for lenders. They can grow like topsy when borrowers can sign up for loans, and extend loans online.
The quid pro quo has to be that the defences are strong enough to protect the public, and that when we fall victim to identity thieves, they act proactively, and fast, in our interests.
Over the years, I’ve lost confidence in lenders to selfregulate, and Iwould be surprised if the minister lets them.
But any industry code (or regulation) he accepts would need to require BNPL lenders to meet minimum legal standards on verifying the identities of the people they lend to, and to monitor accounts for suspicious transactions.
It would need to commit them to proactively contacting people who have their identities stolen, even if it took a bit of work.
It seems lenders may sometimes suspect someone has been the victim of identity theft, or attempted identity theft, and not even tell them, or endeavour to contact them to tell them.
In one of the three cases I mentioned, the victim found several other unsuccessful attempts to take out loans had happened, and as far as he knew the lenders hadn’t tried to alert him.
This is not good enough.
It’s not entirely clear that lenders are committed to proactively alerting the credit reporting bureaus to protect identity theft victims’ credit scores.
There seems to be little in the way of advice given to victims on how to secure their identities again, and there seems to be no minimum time frames for doing all of this.
I would like to see lenders provide details of the crimes against them to identity fraud victims, so they could use them to police.
The threemen I spoke of were all left scratching their heads at how they had fallen victim, and how the crooks fooled the lenders.
There’s a very profitable business model in loans delivered online.
We, the public, should expect to see some of that profit invested into protecting us, and the commerce minister should demand it.
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