The Naked Society by Vance Packard

Author:Vance Packard [Perlstein, Vance Packard, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781935439868
Publisher: IG Publishing

10. The Unlisted Price of Financial Protection

“This man who plans to marry Subject doesn’t know she has been playing around with the two other men that I’ve seen her with in recent weeks.”—Excerpt from report by an insurance investigator assigned to check a young woman who had applied for insurance on a piece of jewelry

Not every investigator, of course, gets to know a Subject better than a prospective marital partner does. But credit and insurance investigators by the tens of thousands do know considerably more about the private lives of millions of U.S. citizens than the citizens realize. They often know considerably more than the Subject has set forth in his application for credit or insurance. These investigators have access to central files; they frequently make telephonic checks; and they often conduct on-the-spot checks in the Subject’s neighborhood or bank.

Credit bureaus like to boast, when soliciting local business, that their records stick to a man like a shadow. There is more than a little truth to this, even if the Subject moves to another state. The nation’s 2000-odd credit bureaus send one another more than 4,000,000 reports on individuals every year. Each bureau routinely assembles a file on each person who applies to a client company for credit. The file is likely to contain information on jobs, residences, family, income, bank account, legal tangles, debts, speed of paying bills, etc. It adds up to an assessment of background . . . credit . . . character—the kind of information that helps the businessman selling on credit to determine quickly how much of a chance he is taking. When a client requests a special report (which may cost $15 to $100 or more) the bureau’s investigators will probe more thoroughly; and, if the information is deemed pertinent, they can provide such additional items as the Subject’s college grades or the stability of his marriage.

Author Hillel Black dug so thoroughly into one giant operation, the Credit Bureau of Greater New York, that it has tried—unsuccessfully—to pull a security curtain around its operations.1 Black learned that this bureau adds 1,000,000 “derogatory” reports to its files each year. You can be stigmatized with a “derogatory” report for a host of reasons including slowness in paying rent or bills. Much of the unfavorable information is provided by the bureau’s member firms. More than two dozen “rush-phone girls” in the bureau’s file rooms can give a nervous clerk or credit manager at a client store a report in less than two minutes. The bureau also has about forty investigators who run some type of check on about 250,000 individuals each year. Mostly they work by phone to save time. The average investigator handles about twenty cases a day. He may call a Subject’s landlord, neighbors, superiors, or bank and track him through various directories. Retailers Commercial, a subsidiary of the giant Retail Credit Company, is also active in providing credit checks on individuals in many cities.

Both credit investigators and insurance investigators rely greatly upon a special telephone book that is often called “the crisscross book,” or “the cross-street book.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.