18 October 2009

National HUNTER the anti-fraud system

The National HUNTER system is an anti-fraud data sharing system for use by members of the Financial Services Industry

When a financial institution rejects an application for credit, they usually advice you to contact the three credit reference agencies; Equifax, Experian or Call credit to find out the information they have on you. This can be obtained for £2.00 by post or slightly more expensive if you require an instant online copy.

What can be difficult to understand is when your credit record with these agencies is clear and you have still been rejected! This could be as a result of the individual financial institution’s credit scoring policy however this also could be due to a search conducted on the National Hunter system

National Hunter is run by Lenders and does not assess credit in the same way as the other credit reference agencies; its sole aim is fraud prevention. National Hunter warns a lender of a potential application fraud.

Application fraud is when an individual or group of individuals apply for financial services and knowingly misrepresents facts within their application. The Case can be declined as suspect for things like:

An application is made and the applicant deliberately fails to disclose previous address information as they have adverse financial information present at that address
An applicant inflates their annual income to obtain additional borrowing.
An applicant impersonates another person after obtaining personal information about them and applies in their name.
An application submits Inconsistent applications to different lenders
If there are a number of changes of salary or employer over a short period of time
An applicant uses different spellings of names and/or there is a change of dates of birth

As with all the other reference agencies, you do have a right under the Data Protection Act to know what information is held about you on file. There is a cost of £10.00 for this. Information on how to obtain a copy of your file can be found on www.nhunter.co.uk