Knowing me, knowing you… ah-ha! [The hidden 'credit reference agency' - N Hunter Limited]
This evening, I stumbled accross an article on the Guardian’s website; it details a little known agency which is apparently owned by banks in the UK and processes “fraud” data collected from credit applications.
Unfortunately, this agency is not well known at all – I certainly didn’t know about it. If nobody knows about it, then they cannot check the information held is correct nor challenge any data held. According to the article at least, the agency’s heuristics are also questionable: it uses previous application information to assess suspicious changes in a person’s income, employment, variations in identification documents and even if the same mobile phone number has been used on two different people’s applications. I can think of a number examples which would trigger those rules in legitimate scenarios.
According to the article, the company also charges the maximum charge for a subject access request under the Data Protection Act, whereas normal credit reference agencies charge a nominal £2.
To make things worse, the agency’s address is a “PO Box” address – something that I suspect if were on an normal application for credit would cause it to be turned down and marked as possibly fraudulent.
In the next few weeks, I intend to post several articles on the issue of how our data is handled by credit referencing agencies and financial institutions but I thought this was a corker to start off with.
The agency’s website is www.nhunter.co.uk, its advertised address is:
N Hunter Limited
PO Box 2756
Stoke-on-Trent
ST6 9AQ
It has no email or telephone number.
Looking up the whois entry for the domain name you get this address:
1 Bungalow, Rownall Road, Werrington
Stoke on Trent
Staffordshire
ST9 0JB
GB
which is pretty suspicious, as it looks like a residential address.
The IP seems to belong to Avensys Networks, AS8553.
If anybody has additional information on this agency, or how widespread their use is within the banking sector, then please post a comment or contact me.
UPDATED 12th April 2010: Added [] extra meaning in title.