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sschueller

Is those Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and Bill Gates real SS numbers?

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These seem to have been leaked before [1, 2], so that's not very conclusive...

[1] https://www.facebook.com/HydraHackingUnited/posts/9614975439... (November 24, 2015)

[2] http://www.jeuxvideo.com/forums/1-50-138814262-1-0-1-0-qui-s... (June 20, 2013)

The third one in the screenshot seems to be for Bill Gates, though it's conveniently cut-off. Has that also been in a previous leak?

There are results showing up on the web, eg. here:

http://www.techjamaica.com/forums/showthread.php?110860-Bill...

Dunno why, but just surprised that Kim K's credit score with Equifax is 643. Unrelated, sorry.

No, I actually thought the same thing, which made me think maybe this isn't real? That number seems really low, doesn't it?

I wouldn't be that surprised that she would miss lots of consecutive payments. Not because she didn't have the money, but because she doesn't care. 3 late payments in a row on a mortgage, credit card, etc, drags down your score a lot.

Or perhaps she had little credit history. I could see a scenario where most of her stuff is financed through an LLC vs her personal credit. If your business is solely "being popular", almost everything is a business expense :)

I doubt she's sitting down once a week or so and paying any bills. I imagine somebody else does that for her.

Plenty of celebs are late payers. Whether that's because they pay bills themselves, or just fail to route stuff to their accountants, I have no idea.

There's more than one embarrassing car repo celeb picture floating around.

Auto pay is not hard to set up.

This data is questionable anyway.

Goes to show how silly credit scores are

They are insidious, not silly.

The reason is that they mean little for those with tons of money - but they mean everything for the average person with limited money.

They literally keep the poor poor.

The concept of credit scores has a reason to exist, it's just our implementation is broke a million times over. There's nothing wrong with a business loaning you money having the knowledge aforehand that you don't pay your obligations on time.

So it is! Yet, the ideal score is not one that reflects ability to repay, but ability to say conveniently under the thumb of a credit card company.

If by "under the thumb of" you mean "using less than 30% of available credit and carrying some kind of balance". There's no need to apply melodrama to a simple matter of statistics to answer the question of whether someone can use credit responsibly.

Kanye is famously $53 million in debt, so it makes sense actually.

Being $53 million in debt seems like something that would result in you having an excellent credit score.

A credit score is a signal to potential _new_ creditors about how likely you are to be able to pay back _new_ debts. A factor in credit FairISAAC is the proportion of your outstanding revolving credit you are currently using (more being worse, above about 30%). It could be a sign that your income is unable to pay down your debt (becoming a runaway debt problem).

All to say that just because you've been able to convince creditors to loan you $53 million doesn't necessarily mean your credit is good.

I guess publicly begging Mark Zuckerburg for $50 million doesn’t get factored in, so you’re probably right.

How is Kim's credit score in any way related to Kanye?

Well they’re married so maybe they have a joint account or two?

That makes sense to me.

Having zero debt (and no credit cards) can easily knock your score that low, even if you have a perfect payment record.

The whole credit score thing is an extortion game:

To the consumer: Want a loan? Buy everything on cash back cards.

To vendors: Don't like the fact that we're upping transaction fees? What percentage of your customers use credit cards again?

If they actually were worried about your ability to repay a new debt, the fact that you already have a pile of debt would not increase your score.

It's not the pile of debt that increases the score. It's the history of repaying that debt per its agreed terms that does.

While I'm not a fan of the credit bureau system, I understand the reasoning behind it. It's an efficient way for creditors to get access to the needed information. Lacking that, to allow the bank to evaluate your creditworthiness among other things you'd likely have to provide a list of references of past creditors and then your new potential creditor would have to validate those references individually: verify you had credit with them, verify you adhered to the payment terms, etc.

For better or for worse today instead of an on-demand complete graph we've got a centralized cache. This serves the needs of the financial players better (read: cheaper) while putting the PII of consumers at more risk.

The point is that the credit score system is utterly dominated by past credit (and its repayment), even though other factors (like current wealth and income) are far more important in practice - and this leads to paradoxical and absurd situations where someone can be filthy rich, but have low credit score because they have zero credit history, never having taken a loan.

Many other countries don't have such a system, and creditors use your past and projected income as a basis for making decisions.

> other factors (like current wealth and income) are far more important in practice - and this leads to paradoxical and absurd situations

From the perspective of the finance industry, these "absurd situations" are so far below the level of noise that they are effectively theoretical. If you want to discuss "in practice": in practice the users of the US credit system have no "current wealth" worth speaking of (look up the median net worth of US households), and their ability to maintain their existing debt is the defining feature of their financial status.

Income is more important than wealth, anyway.

Again, there are many countries - including First World European countries - that don't have the credit score system, or only have reports on non-payments (usually govt-run). They seem to be doing just fine.

Lenders in the US are just trying to maximize their risk-adjusted profit - there's no conspiracy here. If income alone was just as good as income + debt servicing history for making the statistical decisions required to maximize credit industry profits (decisions like whether or not to lend, at what rate, at what ratio to income/assets, etc), do you think the lenders would pay the overhead of the additional useless tracking? Are you suggesting that Equifax & Co. are pulling a fast one on the US lenders and their armies of actuaries and after all these years the lenders haven't noticed the uselessness of the product?

Not at all. My point, rather, is that the credit industry can still function pretty damn well without having access to aggregated credit history and scores, and so banning the practice altogether, or severely limiting the amount of data so collected, in the interests of public good (privacy protections etc), should be considered a viable option on the table.

Not only that. Celebrities that got money quickly often end up with debt or very little money. Having access indirectly via family members is no guarantee. For a bank, such a client can be very risky, much riskier than someone with a regular income.

Looks like it COULD BE, those first three numbers are in the range of someone from NY and someone from CA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Social_Security_Area_N...

It's only ~$14k USD for us to buy 1 mil entries. Maybe we could crowd fund it and see how real it is?

Why not buy a single entry - yourself - to verify? I don't particularly want to give these guys $14k.

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