I am sure that there are lots and lots of blogs out there about ".Com Lenders", so if no one reads this one it is OK, but I just wanted to share a recent experience I had with a Borrower. I got a call from one of the Realtors that I call on, and she wanted me to call one of her family members, because she was concerned about how they were going about getting pre-qualified for a loan. It seems that these young family members had decided to try to purchase a house and had not talked to her first about it. They had the right idea about getting pre-qualified and seeing what they could afford, but unfortunately they watch a little too much TV.
Like most young couples they still have a lot of lessons to learn in life. One of them is, talk to your elders before you make major decisions in your life, especially if those elders are in a related business to what you want to do. It seems that they had heard one of those ad's that tell you to call them because they will get you the 4 best quotes for a mortgage, have the banks compete for your business. It sounded good, they went online and gave ALL their personal information, and then the phone calls started. They got a few more calls then the 4 they were expecting, and they started to get concerned. That is when they talked to the person that they should have talked to first in the first place. Hearing what they had done this Realtor told them about the hazards of the ".com lenders", and told them that she was going to have me call them.
I did and as is always my practice, I want to look at the Credit Report, before I did any thing else. I asked their permission to run their credit, and ran the report. Knowing what they had done, I quickly looked at the number of inquiries. They had their credit run 16 times in a three day period. That means that at least 16 lenders had their personal information. Information that if it were to fall into the wrong hands, could have some very bad consequences.
It is mind boggling to me how this day and age of identity theft, people still so easily give that information. Hopefully they have learned a lesson, but how many people are exposing themselves to the same thing daily? Hopefully safe guards will be put into place in the near future to protect against this sort of things. But until then the best advice I can give is, protect your personal information, and stay away from the ".com lenders."
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