Recently I have been the victim of false and inaccurate information published on my credit file.  I am certain that there are hundreds of thousands of other people in the same position.  Experian and Equifax, the two key offenders in this, seem to be above the law, certainly above justice.  They can say what they want with impunity and if you want to do anything about it you are faced with convoluted, complicated and lengthy processes that are clearly designed to grind you down and deter any correction of the nonsense that these modern day robber barons want to publish.

The Data Protection Act, which is supposed to protect us from such iniquitous conduct and the Information Commissioner, who is supposed to be our guardian in such matters, are both toothless, useless and all part of the self-sustaining system promulgated by the banks which is a matter of national scandal.

Of course, a large part of their power comes from the fact that nobody wants to put their head above the parapet for fear of making their own position worse.  This is the real iniquity which makes their oppression self-sustaining, in fact, makes it stronger and stronger the longer it is allowed to continue.

At the most basic level you are entitled under law to get a copy of your own credit file within seven days for a fee of £2.00.  I wonder if anyone has ever actually achieved this?  It took me something in excess of six weeks to get mine after I’d been told that my requests hadn’t been received, that my identity needed to be verified, that they had a large backlog of requests.  They use the Data Protection Act as a reason they cannot  comply with the Data Protection Act and if you make a complaint to the Information Commissioner, as I have, well you might as well p**s in the wind because it just gets lost in a morass of queues, delays, bureaucracy and I expect I’ll be lucky to hear anything a year from now.

There are many, many more impenetrable layers to this.  Experian and Equifax both operate some of the worst designed, most difficult websites I have ever come across.  They provide you with reference numbers that when you enter them precisely as given to you in writing you are told that they are in an “incorrect format”.  They promise to acknowledge queries but do not do so.  They provide hundreds and hundreds of pages of useless, confusing, mind-numbing “information” which you have to wade through before you can make a specific enquiry.

There is only one conclusion that any reasonable person can make and that it that these websites are deliberately designed to obfuscate, to confuse and to deter the man in the street from proceeding any further.

I discovered a County Court Judgment registered against me in a case where I am suing a local authority (yes, I am suing them!) and in which I have a document in front of me with a Court stamp stating that no such judgment exists.  I discovered another entirely fictitious judgment which was shown on my credit file this month (August), supposedly made in 2006, which did not show on my own copy of my credit file in June.

The buck really does stop with the Information Commissioner but he, Richard Thomas, appointed by the Queen, as I have already demonstrated, is worse than useless and is merely a sop to deflect any concern about this dastardly conduct that the banks and financial tyrants are engaged in.