I wish I had the time to update my first website BayHouse, established in 1995. I still have my bio there, it’s very long and very outdated.  Since I had a California real estate and mortgage broker business I explained how the business worked — and still works.  The interest rates and home values changed, the principles remained the same.

Some of the credit advice is dated, but my 1997 FICO is FRAUD page is as relevant as ever.  While the scoring formulas changed, FICO scoring is still a giant fraud and likely the most important cause of the current credit crisis.  FICO scores never predicted defaults, they CAUSE defaults.

In 1997 I started my first internet forum about real estate, credit and finance.

In 1998 I started a new forum and we sure had some great discussions.  Several members were “credit insiders” and there was a lot of enthusiasm about FICO score research. This was before the days of online myFICO reports with score factors.

We discovered that FICO scores substitute the “high credit” to calculate the revolving balance/limit ratio when creditors such as Capital One didn’t report the credit limits, often seriously lowering the FICO scores.

In 4/2001 I had my first conversation with Barry Paperno at Fair Isaac.

Reading through that thread brings back memories.  I’m still corresponding with “Shylock”, who moved to Peru, and I sure hope that Douglas Pratt is well.  The internet is often disparaged as a place for fakes and con artists, but I also met many real people with REAL problems.

Due to popular request, I created a category for Credit and Dating, which unfortunately lead to a repulsive book claiming that good credit is sexy.  I discovered that most “consumer advocates” are as corrupt as any politician.

In 2003, I started the new CreditForum.org and it didn’t take long until there were thousands of posts and I moved some of the more important topics to The best of …

And I started the CreditFactors subscription resource site and forum.

I filed my first federal suits in 2003 and 2004 and the major issue was the CRAs’ refusal to report the Capital One credit limits.

The credit bureaus had refused to report the credit limits DESPITE my disputes and even providing copies of the statements with the credit limit.

Phoenix Arizona judge Wake dismissed these claims against Equifax, Capital One and Target in late 2006.  He stated that I documented the damages, but that the FCRA does not specifically require the reporting of credit limits. I’ve been waiting for the 9th circuit court of appeals ruling since 7/07.

I had to dismiss my 2003 suit with prejudice to get Experian and ConsumerInfo.com to delete my unredacted credit reports from PACER where anyone could download them for 8 cents/page.

Ironically, one of my claims against Experian was that it provided my credit reports to persons without permissible purpose.  Judge Broomfield denied my three motions to have my credit reports sealed.  These rulings are also on appeal in the 9th circuit court of appeals.

If nothing else, I documented that the American “justice” system ought to be renamed.  I don’t know anyone who found justice in an American court.  Even when you win, you lose.

In 2004, I closed CreditForum.org to new posts and started the Fight Back!!! forum.

I was tired of answering the same credit question for the 50th time, the spam, the morons, the whiners …   I wanted to focus on lawsuits and activism.

I submitted my comments regarding credit and scoring to regulators and legislators.

I hadn’t realized that when regulators request “public comments” regarding new legislation, they don’t actually want to hear from the public.   They only look at the submissions from “organizations”, primarily the creditor, collector and CRA organizations and 2 or 3 of the large consumer organizations.  Unfortunately, they don’t know anything about credit and are for the most part bought and paid for by the industry.

My apologies to the many readers who submitted their comments, I really thought they could make a difference.  Sorry!

In December 2006, I disabled registration at Fight Back!!!

Nobody was fighting back.  I still post updates at Fight Back!!!, but I have no time and interest to work free of charge for people who are not willing to put up a public fight.  The “insiders” started to contact me privately by email.

Since Fair Isaac had started to sell the myFICO reports with the score factors directly to consumers,  I researched my clients’ scores and I documented many issues and even bugs in the scoring formulas.

It’s understandable that the average person doesn’t have the skills to analyze myFICO reports, but why aren’t there at least a few credit professionals documenting software bugs and systemic credit reporting and scoring problems?

With the exception of minor updates, the public CreditFactors site has been static since I started it in 2003. I’ve  been posting my credit discoveries at my CreditSuit blog and also at CreditLegislation.org.  Unfortunately, the wowBB software broke during a server upgrade in 2007 and I can’t even edit typos anymore.  And with over 2000 entries at the blog, it’s once again difficult to get relevant search results.

So I decided to start a new blog here at CreditFactors exclusively for credit and FICO scoring issues.

I’m hoping that credit repair people will start analyzing the myFICO reports instead of sending frivolous disputes and maybe there’s interest in developing software to analyze the reports much faster.  It shouldn’t cost the average consumer $1,000 or more to get through two rounds of disputes.  Software could greatly reduce the time wasted on copying/pasting accounts and score factors from credit reports and it could perform many useful calculations instantly.

I’m also working on making credit reporting and scoring obsolete and the credit crisis might just take care of all these problems.

The above summary is by no means a complete listing of my websites, projects, activities and litigation, but I am determined to keep this page shorter than my bio.  Maybe next winter I’ll finally find time to write the book.