AFSCME 3357-HOF'S BLOG

The Certegy Gold Program: What is it? Privacy Threat? Extortion? You Make the Call.
I've been forwarded complaints about check approval company Certegy. One consumer was not allowed to write a retailer a check due to a Certegy report. This consumer had not bounced any
checks, but the check was "outside our guidelines." Then the consumer was told how she could get in their guidlines by applying for a "Certegy Gold" membership. Here's the link to the Certegy Gold application.

Certegy Gold App.

Vash The Stampede Says:

October 27th, 2004 at 7:43 pm
We got Netflix for a long time and things were going great. But then we got a hold notice on our account. When we asked Certegy, they said they didn’t have enough information on us and that they were sending us an application for a Certegy Gold bank card that we *had* to fill in in order for our Netflix account to continue. We waited just long enough to get the movies that were already headed our way and send them back, then we cancelled our Netflix account.


THE HOBBIT HOLE

It doesn't seem that Certegy Gold is a bank card. It's a way for Certegy, a credit reporting agency specializing in screening checks, to get lots of private data that the company can turn around and sell to its customers.

I'm concerned that Certegy's practice of conditioning approval on the excessive disclosure of private information will spread to thetraditional credit reporting agencies. Certegy is a publicly-traded company, symbol CEY, that is a spin-off from Equifax. Certegy's previous name was Telecredit. As a whole, I haven't seen as many problems with Certegy as Chexsystems. If Chexsystems gets a hold of data like this - look out.