Scored, Flagged & Blacklisted: Inside Australia’s Credit Black Box with Graham Doessel

Your credit score might not be the real reason you were declined.

What if the decision came from a fraud flag, behavioural risk score, or database you're not allowed to see? No notification. No explanation. No right to correct it.

In this episode I sit down with Graham Doessel - Founder & CEO of MyCRA Lawyers, Australia's only dedicated credit repair law firm.

30 years inside the system. 91%+ audited success rate removing defaults. If nine out of ten can be removed, how many should never have been listed?

He debated former Privacy Commissioner Tim Pilgrim on 4BC - the phone lines lit up. He now argues Australia's credit system operates on a "guilty until proven innocent" model.

💡 What You'll Learn - Inside Australia's Credit Black Box:

⚡ The credit decision black box - bureau data, IDMatrix, device fingerprints, behavioural modelling and algorithmic scoring. Apply too often and velocity checks flag you across lenders before a human ever sees it.

🏠 What score do you need for a mortgage? - there's an Equifax threshold borrowers don't know about. Miss it by one point: auto-declined. Hit it and you can still be rejected for postcode, job stability, or a payday lender inquiry. A good score gets you to the door. Behind it is another black box.

🕵️ Equifax's secret fraud list - Fraud Focus Group and IDMatrix databases silently blacklisting people for up to 15 years. Graham asked Equifax directly. They declined to answer. He argues Part IIIA of the Privacy Act requires disclosure if this data is being used to assess or refuse credit - and that isn’t happening.

🔒 How innocent people get flagged and never told - apply too many times while desperate and fraud engines blacklist you for years. Not fraud by any definition. These systems sit outside credit reporting frameworks - declined without seeing what triggered it.

🏦 The debanking connection - opaque scoring and fraud signals intersect with Australia's debanking crisis, explored in my episode with Harrison Dell.

⚖️ "Not a single lender has the legal right to list anything on a credit file" - Graham's bombshell, eight years in the making. Every default, inquiry and late repayment potentially unlawful. Revealed here first.

📮 "They just make shit up" - a creditor sent a fabricated default notice on letterhead of a company that hadn't been incorporated. When challenged, they produced a different document.

🏦 "AFCA sides with the ones who pay their bills." - funded by the same banks and lenders whose complaints it adjudicates. No conflict of interest there, right?

📉 CCR was mis-sold - inquiries 42% of your score. Late repayments 38%. Defaults just 7%. A four-cent late payment does more damage than a court judgment.

🔍 The shadow data economy - skip-tracing platforms aggregating billions of records from telcos, ASIC registers, marketing datasets and public records. Most people don't know these databases exist.

🏛️ 355,000 taxpayers sent to Recoveriescorp - private-equity backed. Final notices targeting welfare recipients. Critics warn of Robodebt 2.0.

📊 Equifax holds 85% of Australia's credit files. One algorithm. Millions of outcomes. People with bad credit "get treated like lepers."

🤬 "These fucksticks in power have no clue."

💀 "The system is fucking broken. It really is."

📊 "They don't give a fuck about you. You're just a number."

Connect with Graham Doessel:

💼 MyCRA Lawyers - https://www.m

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Ryan Tan Show. Today's guest is Graham Dossell, founder and CEO of MyCRA Specialist Credit Lawyers, Australia's only dedicated repair law firm. Graham has spent close to three decades in the credit and finance world. He began as a mortgage broker, running Mortgage Now, sitting on the lending side of the desk, approving and declining applications, seeing firsthand how the system works. Then life happened. A business fallout in the late 1990s destroyed his financial position, and in 2000 he was misadvised into bankruptcy, a decision that followed him for years and fundamentally reshaped his understanding of credit reporting. In 2009, while building what would become my CRA, he was diagnosed with cancer and he beat it. He channeled all of that, the financial devastation, the systemic unfairness, and the personal resilience into building a firm that now fights for everyday Australians who have been locked out of credit by a system that, in Graham's words, can sentence people to five years in credit prison without ever letting them defend themselves. My CRA operates as a nationally incorporated legal practice within the legal practice holdings group alongside Armstrong, Dossel, Stevenson lawyers, also known as ADS Law, giving the firm the ability to escalate disputes beyond back and forth correspondences into full litigation when credit providers and bureaus refuse to engage properly. The firm reports an audited success rate above 91% in removing consumer defaults with roughly one in three clients receiving positive outcomes within seven days. But Graham isn't just a practitioner, he's a policy advocate. He authorized a 32-page submission to the Price WaterhouseCooper's three-year review of the Credit Reporting Code, a submission that directly contributed to the February 2020 reform, removing civil court filings from automatically destroying people's credit files. He's made submissions to the Senate inquiry into financial services targeted at Australians at risk of hardship. He went on 4BC and debated former Privacy Commissioner Tim Pilgrim live on air, challenging the position that reporting consumers even one day late was good for credit reporting. He's been featured across broker news, The Advisor, Smart Company, Australian Banking and Finance, and numerous other industry outlets. And more recently, he's taken his advocacy to TikTok, building a following of more than 27,000 with close to 200,000 likes, running free live QA sessions, answering credit questions from anyone, no charge, no strings attached. This conversation is landing at a pivotal moment. ASIC has launched a review of around 100 credit repair and debt management licensees. Xperian has just completed its$820 million acquisition of Ilian, reducing Australia from three credit bureaus to two. The independent review of Australia's consumer reporting framework has delivered 37 recommendations for reform. ASIC's director suppression changes came into effect this month, and the ATO has referred over 355,000 taxpayers to private debt collector Recoveries Corp since January last year. Credit touches everything: your home, your car, your business, your phone plan, your ability to provide for your family. And most Australians have no idea what's on their file, what rights they have, or how exposed they really are. So today we're going to cover all of it the big picture, the dark side, the myths, the practical steps, and what's coming next. Graham Dossel, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

Ryan, geez, you did your bloody homework, didn't you? That's fantastic. I didn't realise I'd done so much.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Yeah, I looked back on um, you know, some of your older TikTok videos, and you know, you've been a big advocate for credit repair and just passionate about helping everyday Australians for a long time. I saw those older videos of you back in your car as well. So um, you know, you've got a very impressive background.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Thanks, mate. Appreciate that. Yeah, I've been you you hit the nail on the head with the um the history, I suppose, with um I I got um bent over backwards by my business partner. He robbed me, robbed me blind, and the advice I took was bad advice, and I went bankrupt in 2000. And that that has fueled everything I've done ever since. It really is. I've got this internal um what's it what's it called? Injustice intolerance. And it really irks me when there's so many things wrong with our system, and I just got to try and fix it up.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you've um you've been great and pivotal in terms of I guess bringing awareness um of like credit bureaus and I guess credit repair in general to everyday Australians. You know, you started off as a mortgage broker and that was pivotal. You were on the other side of the lending table. Um, I guess what did you see as a broker during your time that made you realize the credit reporting system was broken?

SPEAKER_00 4:39

I suppose um when I first started in broking, I was doing the the normal everyday thing. We'll we're helping people pay off their mortgages faster back in the good old days. I think it started in '97. And um then we moved into trying to find a niche. And I really enjoyed helping people that had issues. It was like a like a puzzle. How can I help this person? They've got all these issues, the mainstream lenders won't touch them. And when we built my uh mortgage now, it was on the back of uh this way prior to the GFC. We're looking at, well, how can we help this person to get a mortgage? Because it's not their fault that they live in a postcode that the creditors don't like, or that their income source in those days was still a lot of cash around. Their income source is one that creditors just say too hard. So we hunted around until we found a number of lenders that's that were unusual circumstance friendly, I suppose would be the best way to say it. And we ended up being able to help pensioners refinance their mortgages at about 1% above the market where nobody else would touch them. It didn't matter whether they were um, as long as they could afford the mortgage, they and they met the qualification criteria, it didn't matter whether they were at the back of Burke, it didn't matter whether they had an unusual income. Uh at one point we had a client from Townsville that had primarily a cash income, and it was because she was a dancer, and she danced on stages and polls and things like that. So most of her income was cash. And in those days, we could we could evidence the income through other circumstances, it didn't have to be going into your bank account. So we did our checks and balances and and um found that yeah, the income stacked up, and then we were one of the only brokerages around that could actually help. So we then got this massive stream of clients in the same industry because they had plenty of money, but they couldn't get loans. And we really enjoyed being able to solve problems like that. So whether they had a bad credit rating, whether they had an unusual income source, an unusual location, or any other number of challenging circumstances, that's what we built mortgage now on. It was a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Yeah, fantastic. It's definitely an area that it's important to ensure people don't get locked out of the system. You know, obviously, I think today small businesses like Soul Traders and people running an entity, especially if it's under 12 months, they have struggles getting a mortgage. I mean, do you think that the system inadvertently does it lock people out? And do you think do you think it's worse?

SPEAKER_00 7:19

It's worse, mate. It's a lot worse. Um, in the old days, it put a lot more emphasis on the consumer taking responsibility these days. The consumer can lie through their bloody teeth, and then it's the lender's fault. It's all up to the lender. The responsible guidelines, uh, responsible lending guidelines are a good idea, but I think it's gone so far that it makes it hard for the lenders to approve loans. It makes it hard for a consumer that's just doesn't exactly fit the box to get money. Um and it we're going down this bloody path of the individual not having to take any responsibility. In the old days, they did. They if they if they we used to have what was called a no-doc loan. So the older viewers here they'll understand they'll remember what that is, where you could just say, Yep, I can afford the loan. If you had equity in your house, they'd lend you the money. Simple as that. And that was fantastic for people who had those unusual circumstances, or they were cash poor but asset rich. Um and in all the years that we were lend uh that we were broking, we had one complaint, only one. And that complaint turned was full of hot air. But after we investigated, we because we documented everything we did, we we followed the rules before there were so many rules to follow. Um this particular person was loaned money against their primary residence with a no-dock loan. Uh the goal was that this particular person was going to use that money to build a house on their block down near the beach. They were going to sell the house that they borrowed the money on, clear the debt, then they'd um have two properties with no debt and living by the beach. Unfortunately, they decided to spend the money on something else. And then later on, they decided, oh, I'm a poor consumer. I'm going to say that I was misled. Thankfully, we keep really good records. So we proved every single thing that we had suggested. But that's the only complaint in thousands of loans because we helped people. Then I got out of the business. I got out of mortgage broking after I got cancer in 2009, and we built Myestra Lawyers after the cancer. And um there were so many people that came back to me when I started My Australia Lawyers because I became um I suppose visual again after after being sick for a while. And they said, You're still doing broken. We still we need a hand, we need a hand. No, I'm not doing it anymore. And because we had helped them where nobody else gave a rat's bum, they were loyal. They were so amazingly loyal. And even today there's a few people that come on the TikTok lives every week just to say g'day, to say thank you, because I got them a mortgage, geez, 15, 20 years ago that no one else cared to even try. It's a really good market to be in because people with unusual circumstances or bad credit they get treated like lepers. And it's not fair because I I've I've had people come onto the lives and say, just pay your bloody bills, you'll be fine, you don't have to have a bad credit or just pay your bloody bills. These are people who've never had the same sort of adversity that most people get when something goes south and it destroys their ability to pay. And I really like solving those puzzles.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Absolutely. And it's always important to have a bit of, I guess, oversight and even like a manual review process because you just see too often uh the black box, right? People go in and they get rejected, and the creditor can't say why, um, and they give you a very vague answer, and that can be due to a number of factors. So, yeah, I guess briefly on the evolution of I guess comprehensive credit reporting when that's come in, um, you know, it was obviously purported to be something which it probably wasn't. Do you think consumers are better off over the last say 10 or 15 years, or has that made it even worse?

SPEAKER_00 11:05

No, it's ridiculous. I mean that you also pointed out in the in your introduction that um I had the conversation live on air with Tim Pilgrim, the privacy commissioner at the time. 4BC, they um had this story because uh the comprehensive comprehensive credit reporting was coming in, and Tim was trying to sell the fact that oh, it's gonna be great for everybody. You know, if you pay your bills on time, you're gonna get offered much better rates and terms and everything else. And if you if you just make a few mistakes, then you you'll probably be the ones that just have to pay the normal rate. And I came on and said, Well, mate, I don't think it's gonna work like that. How I see it happening is that you're expected to pay your bills on time anyway. So if you pay your bills on time, then you're gonna get the normal rate. If you don't pay the bills on time, it's gonna be just another reason to decline you. And when I said that, the phone lines lit up like a bloody Christmas tree. And we had um the the interview was only supposed to go for oh, I think 10 minutes or something. But we, I think we had 20 minutes of me answering questions, people being concerned about how this was happening. And when that interview took place, at that stage, I think it was you are only going to have one or two days grace, and then um there were there was myself and a number of other people that petitioned for being ridiculous. And the argument that I put forward was if you pay your bill on time by B pay, you're going to be reported because it's gonna take four business days until it actually comes through and registers as a payment. And uh those arguments put together then allowed for the regulators to say, okay, well, it's gonna be 14 days. You've got 14 days, Grace. And now what we're seeing is the ridiculousness of this is that a default used to be the or a judgment used to be the worst thing that could happen to your credit file. Now a late repayment of four cents will do more damage to your credit report than a judgment. It's bloody ridiculous. We actually had a mortgage broker uh that we he asked us to fix his credit rating for him because he was really particular about his payments and he got a I think I think he got a 16 cent uh uh uh interest credit on his mortgage. So he decided to shortpay his next payment by 16 cents. It showed in his statement that he got a 16 cent credit. So he short paid by that and then just paid the next mortgage uh payments on time as they were meant to be paid. He didn't find out until six months later that his credit rating was totally smashed because it had his 16 cent payment. Short payment meant that he didn't pay the full mortgage payment. So they recorded a one, then they recorded a two, then they recorded a three, and a four, and a five, and an X. That destroyed his credit report like he was a a leper. It uh didn't take into account it was sixteen cents, it didn't take anything into account except the fact that he had uh missed payments. Uh thankfully we got it resolved reasonably easily because it was bloody ridiculous. But the law doesn't make any differentiation between sixteen cents and sixteen million dollars. If you're late, you're late. The creditors didn't want to do this. This was a government incentive. The legislation was brought in in February, in um 2014, and it wasn't until what, 2022, I think, that the laws were changed to force creditors to actually start reporting it. So what's that? Eight years they said, nah, buggy yeah, we're not doing this, it's not something we want. Because again, it took a lot more, um uh put a lot more burden on the individual creditors to report this stuff, and they have to report it accurately. And now on top of that, they've got additional hardship provisions, which are designed to make it look like you're trying to do the right thing. Whereas in fact, what it does just alerts creditors, you can't pay your bills. It's a ridiculous scenario. We've got these things that when they brought in comprehensive credit reporting, they're saying, Oh, it's gonna be positive credit reporting. Yeah, positive. You do the right things and your scores go up. No, it's just comprehensively more bad stuff.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess in terms of the data sources, um, you know, banks used to primarily be the biggest contributors, or you could say maybe if it was inquiry data, but these days you've got uh telcos, you know, obviously I think Optus puts all the accounts on these reports. You've got FinTech, buy now, pay leader, um, all these things. How do you think that kind of impacts? Does that kind of give a more accurate view of someone's credit position, or does it just introduce unnecessary information?

SPEAKER_00 15:38

We've been doing this a long time, and as far as I can recall, inquiries have always gone on the credit file, but they didn't have the same damaging effect as they have now. The credit reporting bodies are the ones who choose the damaging effect. They're the ones who write the algorithms that say what the information on the credit file means to a score. Keep in mind that we didn't have credit scores in Australia until when did they come in? Probably 20. It was around COVID time, maybe just a bit before COVID. So um prior to that, it was just the individual creditor read the data and made their own determination. When Equifax brought in, it was probably still when Vader was here, when it was Vader, they they brought in the credit score, then suddenly it became they were the ones who decided what the data meant. So now an inquiry has such impact as to be 42% of your credit score. Just inquiries. Next, I think 38% are late repayment history. So a default adverse adverse uh information is only 7%. So they're saying that inquiries are far worse than a default. A late repayment where you've been 15 days late or more, so it's it's got to be more than 14, so 15 or more days late gets reported on your credit file. And for s somehow that's far worse than being more than 60 days late to get a default. Where's the logic? It doesn't make any sense to me. But that's what's happening. And you asked the question before, is this better or worse? It is so far worse for consumers. It makes no logical sense as to why they've done what they've done. I think it's a classic case of um politicians or or policy writers that have this great idea and they think, oh yeah, this is good because it'll make this great new system without thinking it through, without actually interviewing people that live in the real world. Somebody who's born with a silver spoon in their mouth and a stick up their bum doesn't understand how this stuff impacts real people. It really doesn't, they really don't. They should come on my bloody TikTok live for a couple of nights and see how people react to these sort of legislative changes. It'll did it change their mind a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Yeah, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Um, I I guess what do you think drives that? Is that Equifax's kind of modelling of how you know how they kind of weight scores and weight things? Or I guess, you know, why are they doing that?

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Well they don't release the details of their algorithm, how they how their algorithm is made up. They release a little bit of information about parts of it, how it works, like the fact that um uh forty-something percent is inquiries and thirty-eight percent is uh uh late repayment history. But just moving from a suburb to a lower class suburb or a lower socioeconomic area reduces your credit score. Why should where you live reduce your credit score? Their answer is birds of a feather flock together. So let's say, Ryan, you decide to go out and buy a house in a suburb that's an up-and-coming suburb, right? So you buy the house, you move into the house to renovate it because you're a busy man, so you can only do it on weekends and things. You rent out the house because you're gonna be able to flip it or or keep it for a uh a rental, right? Your credit score is gonna take crash just because you changed address. Now it'll do it'll crash for two reasons. One, because you changed address, and that means that you must be uh less stable because you've changed address, and then two, because you changed address to a lowest uh lower socioeconomic area. They think that you're a bad person. Today, we use buy now pay later as the modern lay buy. I don't even know if anybody still does lay buys now because of buy now, pay later. But the credit reporting system sees that as oh, you can't afford to buy a pizza, you put a pizza on PayPal, pay in four, you are so bad, scum of the earth, that we're gonna completely crash your credit score. Doesn't make any sense, but that's what they do. People use it for this purpose, the credit reporting body judges it as if it's a really bad thing. Makes no sense.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

I guess there's a lot of talk around scores versus quality of the report. People might say I'm an 850 or I'm a 1200 or whatnot. I guess I'm curious to understand from your perspective, how does a pure score versus the quality of the information, how does that feed into say commercial bureaus such as banks and telcos, what are they looking for? Is it a pure score or is there certain data that's just you know cuts you out?

SPEAKER_00 20:41

It's a combination. You might have a good score, but you might have a payday lender on your credit file. So you could be absolutely top of the tree. In fact, we've had a client like this. They they uh mum and dad were squeaky clean in every possible way. But their, I think it was their son, late teens, early 20s, had got themselves in a little bit of financial strife. So they went to a payday lender and borrowed money for their son and made their son pay it back so the son could learn a lesson that you get in the poo, you you have to find a way to get out of it. And one of those ways is high interest loans. And they had all the documentation to back this up, but it was their credit score that took a hit. So they came to us to remove it because they thought they were doing the right thing by helping their their um child learn a lesson in life, but it completely crashed their credit score, their ability to borrow money. It didn't crash the score as much, but it crashed their ability to borrow money because the lender they went to refinance their house and the lender said, No way, you've got a payday lender on your credit file. So we had to remove the inquiry. When this happened, they didn't have the open accounts on the um credit files for the payday lenders, so we only had to remove the inquiry. Yeah, but they couldn't they couldn't buy their home because of the payday lender. So it doesn't make any sense, does it? I mean, they could prove that they did it specifically for their child to learn a lesson. But the lender focused on the fact they had a payday lender inquiry, so they said no. Same thing happens with um, generally speaking, you'll need a 650 plus Equifax credit score to qualify for a normal mortgage. Yes, you can get a mortgage with less than that, but you'll have uh higher interest rates or higher uh conditions or restrictions or something else. So if you need a a plus sixty a plus six fifty Equifax credit score and you don't have it, it'll be an automatic decline. Just because of the score. Now you asked before about how the banks, the creditors view this. If you get past that 650, so let's say you've got a 651, just just get past. It'll fly through because it's 650 or it's not 650. Once you get past that, you might still be declined because of the other information on your credit file. They might not like where you live, your postcode, they might not like your job, they might not like how long you've lived there or how long you've had your job, how often you change jobs. These are things that you're marked down on by the credit reporting body, but also the lender will look at it and judge you independently of how the credit reporting body judges you. Uh, in addition to that, of course, the lender will look at whether or not you service, whether or not you've got the income to support the mortgage and or or the or the credit. And actually that brings me back to another thing, too. In the old days, in the good old days, where the consumer actually took some responsibility, there was a, I can't think what it's called now, there was a mortgage based on merit. So you might have been renting forever and your rental was much higher than your proposed mortgage. They'd give you the loan based on that, the fact that you've evidenced that you can afford to pay that on an ongoing basis. Today, a lot of those opportunities are gone because of the Royal Commission and because of the responsible lending guidelines. Now, if you don't meet the criteria, too bad, so sad, Nicolf. Really don't care. You're stuck in the rental loop because you physically don't make enough money to meet the criteria, regardless of the fact that you might have been able to evidence you can do it. So how they treat it is on an individual case-by-case basis based on their rules and whether or not you make it to even being assessed by their rules with the information in your credit file. A bad credit rating will stop you getting a mortgage or a loan, a good credit rating won't guarantee you'll get one. At least it'll mean that you haven't been stopped getting to that stage to be assessed. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And for mortgages, it's great. Obviously, you've got brokers and um people you can speak to, but let's say for a more automated algorithmic thing, um, you know, can customers find out why there might have been declined, especially when they're getting vague notices saying, you know, you don't meet the credit criteria? And I guess this then feeds in uh, as you say, our mortgages to the shared fraud database uh and FEG from Equifax. I mean, is there any visibility for why people are declined? Because some customers say, I want to improve, I want to actually figure out how I can and do things better. And these creditors just tell them, you know, decline, we can't specify.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Yeah, well, if the um if the account has been declined, or if the application has been declined for credit reasons, credit reporting reasons, they have to tell you it was for credit. They don't have to tell you specifically what, but they have to tell you it's credit. And that way, at least you can go back and get a copy of your credit file and see what's on there. Unfortunately, these days you might go and have a look at your credit file and there's nothing there. It's perfect. You've got an 800, 900 credit score, whether it be with Equifax, Ilion, or Experian, everything looks sweet. So why are you declined? You know that you make plenty of money. You know that everything's sweet, but you've got a decline. You mentioned the uh uh fraud focus group, and um there are a number of other databases like that. Funny enough, I actually asked Equifax directly yesterday about why it is that the information contained within the fraud focus group does not appear on the credit file when it clearly affects your ability to get a mortgage or get it get credit, which means it's clearly uh credit worthiness information, which is a legal requirement that have all credit worthiness information available in your credit file. They decline to answer. I believe that those databases are a direct breach of the Privacy Act. I believe that the credit reporting bodies that maintain those databases uh should be significantly sanctioned under the law. The uh Privacy Act was changed in the late in the 2024 version or the 2025 version that allow, I think late 2024 version, that allows the courts to impose up to a$50 million fine. That would make the credit reporting body sit up and take notice. But the lenders in this country have been breaching the laws in the Privacy Act forever. There is not a single lender that I've found that has any legal right to put anything on a credit file because they they don't meet the basic foundational requirements of the Privacy Act. AFCA doesn't even know how to read the bloody legislation. They side with the creditors. Funny that, hey, they side with the ones who pay their bills.

SPEAKER_02 27:18

Hmm.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Interesting. Um it's just an interesting observation, not making any aspersions, there's just an observation. Um, but the um the credit reporting bodies haven't been enforcing. The OAC doesn't enforce individual uh um situations, they they look for systemic breaches. I would suggest that almost every single creditor could be guilty of systemic breaches under under the OWAC rules because they all make the same mistakes. And there's no one out there that does spot checks on them. If you understand the legislation, you're gonna have a look at any creditor's website, they're all wrong. They don't meet the minimum criteria. But this is what consumers have to put up with. I'm blessed that I've actually read the legislation and my team, my lawyers, my paralegals were across this stuff. The average consumer doesn't even know where to start. They don't know what their rights are. And I believe the creditors and the debt collectors in this country take advantage of that.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Absolutely. I mean, the whole thing comes together, you've got Equifax over 85% market share, you've got these groups um, you know, doing these things, you've got the black boxes, you've got no visibility, and like you mentioned, people who actually stand up and take it to the OEIC, they face six to twelve months awaiting a case manager at intake, and then beyond that stage, they get stuffed around or fucked around and no one knows what's going on. So I think, you know, you could even say that these opaque risk scoring models, they're running rampant and um they're unregulated in Australia, much to people's and business detriment as well.

SPEAKER_00 28:49

Well, one of the one of the biggest questions we get on on the TikTok lives is why is there more than one score? Why do I not have just one score? They don't realise these are businesses that run these scores. They're not government bodies, they're quasi-government because they've got a lot of rules to follow, but they're businesses who make up how your life is going to be determined in your credit report. It's pretty bloody scary when you think about it. And they're multi-billion dollar multinational companies, too. So they don't give a rat's ass about you, Ryan. You're just an algorithm, or you're just a number that gets treated however you get treated by the algorithm. They don't care.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I want to move on to um, you know, on the dark side of credit repair. Um, I think, you know, obviously, you know, you've heard people running credit repair and fix your credit file and all these things. Um, and I mean ASIC has done a bit of a crackdown um last July. Um, they announced they're probing about 100 credit repair and debt management licenses. Um, and Commissioner Copeland, you know, he highlighted cases of consumers left in the dark, uh, firms pushing people to bankruptcy and strict no refund policies despite service failures now. I guess having seen your work in MyC already, probably the best or one of the best in terms of compliance and how transparent you are. But I guess what's your thoughts on the dark side of this credit repair stuff in Australia?

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Well, it's interesting you you bring up the uh no refunds thing because we've got no refund policy because we're a law firm and it's a um uh a fixed fee. So if we start up front, then we are taking the risk. If if we get it removed quickly, we make a dollar. If it takes forever, uh we don't make any money at all. I had a um a file a number of years ago that ANZ had done the wrong thing by a client, in my humble opinion. The creditor, ANZ, took two years, two years before we got the default removed. And we respond quickly to actions of the creditors and clients and everything else. But the creditors tend to delay, delay, delay, which is why it took so bloody long. By the time we got that default removed, the client had been awarded a number of different forms of compensation for the wrongs that ANZ had done. Um, but unfortunately, he'd lost a large deposit on a property purchase. And by the time we got to the end of it, we had spent two years working in his file. Can you imagine what that would have cost him if we were charging an hour rate? Horrendous amount of money. It would have made it unrealistic for him to continue because of the delays of the creditor. Whereas if we get something removed in a day, we actually make a good profit on it. That allows us to fund those that take a long time. And I was actually having this conversation, I think, last night or the night before, for the first time ever, I was explaining why it is we take on the creditors or the bad credit that we know is going to take us a long time. And the answer is I had to actually think about it, but the answer is now quite simple because I have this injustice intolerance. And if you had a credit corp default and you had using ANZ, I don't actually have any issue against ANZ, but I use them as a simple example all the time. If you had an ANZ default that was a difficult one, for instance, if I removed your credit corp but not your ANZ, you still can't get your mortgage. So it wouldn't be fair if I just did the easy ones. It would probably be cheaper if I did that because I wouldn't have to allow for the harder defaults to be removed. I could just price on the actual amount of time it takes to remove that particular matter. And you might argue, for instance, that and I've I've thought about this all the time, you might argue, well, okay, oh, I've only got a credit corp, so I should be cheaper because I'm not I don't want to pay for that other bloke who's got an ANZ. Well, this is the way we do business, that's how I structure it, that's what I want to do. But if I didn't remove those the ANZs and the city banks and the bloody HSBCs for people, they wouldn't be able to get their mortgages. So I've actually gone off track there now. Ryan, I can't remember where I was heading with that, but this is a conversation I had on um on TikTok a day or so ago. And if if the defaults weren't removed, if the late repayment history wasn't removed, if the inquiries weren't removed, your life's buggered just because the credit reporting bodies decide that's how the algorithm should be. I think we're talking about um uh the dodgy credit repairs, weren't we? Before I went off track and went down my rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_01 33:34

Yes, yes, in the Fox Simes of the world and all those people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

Yeah, yeah. And a lot of these people, um, using the Part 9 debt agreements, using Foxy's as an example, uh, a lot of these debt management organizations, as they're now called, since they've got a credit license, they've had to clean up their act, but it's been well known that they would sell their part nine debt agreements, for instance, as a debt consolidation. You're putting all of your debts together into one simple to pay payment every week or every month, and it makes your life easy. Now they they've got their arse covered by having in their documentation that they know nobody reads that it's part of the bankruptcy act. It's part nine of the bankruptcy act. But because they sell this the impression that it's gonna make life easier, you're going to have all of your payments into one simple, easy-to-make payment, people don't realize it's gonna completely destroy their credit rating for five full years. It's a part nine of the bankruptcy act. You are effectively going bankrupt, but you've still got to pay the debt. That doesn't seem fair in most cases. I haven't looked at the exact numbers, but it feels like 80% of the people that go into a part nine debt agreement probably should have gone bankrupt or got better advice because there's a limited number of people that get the benefit of a part nine debt agreement. I believe it's long overdue that ASIC look into this area. They introduced the credit license to fix it, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of fixing happening. The there have been a couple of credit repairers that have been sanctioned, but not enough. Once ASIC finished looking in it, uh finished looking into it, I believe that the Legal Service Commission, the Legal Services Boards around Australia should also look into it because this is legal act, this is legal work by its very definition. I published a couple of papers on that, but it it strikes me as unusual why somebody who was a plumber yesterday can go and apply for a credit license, get their credit license, which is pretty damned easy to do, and then open up shop as a credit repairer with no legal training, no legal knowledge, and start giving legal advice. The definition of the legal advice is that it is if you know more about the legal matter than the average person and you're charging a fee to help somebody with their legal problem, with their problem, that's legal advice. And there's case law published on our website that um case studies referring to the case law that uh one of my solicitors wrote up about this. And I've spoken personally to legal service commissions and legal services boards around Australia, and it surprises me that they haven't taken any action. It's a six-four thousand, or last time I checked, it was a$54,000 fine or two years in jail per offence. Every client they take on that they give legal advice to, even if they say they're not giving legal advice, it still is. In fact, one of the cases we cite is where the guy said on his um little ad saying you don't need a solicitor, I'll help you do this, says, I don't give you legal advice. I've got a legal um degree overseas, so I know my stuff, but I'm not giving you legal advice. It's the judge said, Oh, yes, you are, and you're pinged. So it's it's interesting that the regulators don't seem to want to take action on this, and it hurts the consumer. There are so many people that come to us for help where they've gone to one of these cheap credit repair backyarders. I shouldn't say them, they call them backyarders, they do have a credit license, most of them. Not all of them, most of them. But the credit repairers say that that uh the the default can't be removed. And yet we some of them turn out to be things like Credit Corp. Last night, last night on my live, um, a particular person came on to say that they had got advice from a credit repairer and said that uh the credit corp default was a 50-50, whether or not they could get it removed. Credit Corp just happens to be one of those we remove in less than seven days, most of them with one within one or two days. So it strikes me as unusual that a credit repairer would be out there saying it's a 50-50 chance if they know what they're doing.

SPEAKER_01 37:52

Absolutely. What positions uh, you know, there's a lot of these credit repair agencies, uh, and more than ever, people are marketing themselves as just as you're discussing. Um, I guess, you know, how do ethical credit repair lawyers like yourself, how do they distinguish themselves? And obviously, I guess you have the advantage um that you obviously have the law firm attached to you. Um, what should customers or consumers be looking for when they're looking to choose uh a credit repairer?

SPEAKER_00 38:19

Well, uh you said um lawyers like yourself, I'm not a lawyer, remember that. I own the law firm, I'm not a lawyer. I'm very, very careful not to give legal advice. Uh the information I give out is general information, and it is um all I always say that if you want specific legal advice, go and see one of our lawyers. You can book one of our lawyers or go see your own lawyer. Um the what should consumers be looking for? Transparency, I suppose. Um there's a number of people that do uh podcasts, there's a number of people that do videos like I do and and lives. Um some of them sound pretty good, some of them look pretty good, but then they say things like it's a 50-50 chance you can get an inquiry removed. If you know the legislation, then that is never something you'd say because when you base your opinions like that on the facts, what's in the legislation, then there's nobody that would say it's a 50-50 chance because that's that's like rolling a dice. You're gonna spend money with someone who's rolling the dice. You know, we do have a 91.6% removal resolution rate, uh, independently externally audited. It's our our true figures are much higher than that now. But if I went to people and said that we've got a 99% success rate, it's probably gonna be less believable than one that actually has a bit of a margin for error. So I've never actually bothered to get a new um audit done, audit of the removal resolution rate, but I'm happy to provide it with anybody anytime because it's shit. It's rare that we miss out on something. The um the credit repairers, in my humble opinion, a lot of them want to do the right thing. They have the same type of injustice intolerance that I have. I'm just fortunate that I started law firms a long time ago, and it means that I have lawyers and paralegals that do all this work. I don't get involved in the day-to-day, except that I love to read legislation, I love to go digging and finding, go down a rabbit hole and see where that takes me. And most of our breakthroughs over the years have been because I've gone down a rabbit hole, and I thought, ooh, that doesn't sound right. And I go reading and reading and reading until I find either a dead end and I had a completely wrong idea, or find something that's a bit of a breakthrough. And one of the breakthroughs we've got at the moment, I've known about for oh geez, probably eight years, but I couldn't quite put the pieces together. And over the last 12 months, those pieces have all come together, which now shows me that there is not a single default inquiry or late repayment history that should be on a credit file at all in this country, because not a single creditor that we've found meets the minimum basic criteria. And unfortunately, a lot of these creditors, their area of expertise is lending, providing credit, hence the name creditor. It's not in legislation or in privacy legislation. So they've had to rely on a solicitor to write, hopefully a solicitor, to write their privacy policies, their credit reporting policies, their statement of notifiable matters, and give them, as a creditor, advice on how that needs to be structured. And they're wrong. Their area of expertise is not in privacy like ours is. But when you go into the Privacy Act, when you go into the Credit Reporting Code, when you go into the NCCP and tie it all together, the National Consumer Credit Protection Act, tie it all together, things start to pop up that other people don't see because they're not looking for what we're looking for. And we've had some pretty interesting breakthroughs, which I'm not going to share right now.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

Yeah, I think that's pretty cool. You know, you've obviously taken on um policy advocacy in a very unique way, which I think is cool. Um, you know, you've challenged the PwC review of the credit reporting code. Um, you know, you've been vocal on like Fox Arms practices, uh, bank surveillance, the aloof group fraud and all that. Um, I guess what do you want to see coming up? You know, obviously ASIC's got that review into credit repair. What do you want to see from a legislative point of view and where are the gaps right now?

SPEAKER_00 43:08

Well, I don't think ASIC should be the policing this because they don't have the resources. Um the it's good there's someone policing it, but I don't think they have the resources. Unfortunately, the the law societies and the legal service commissions around the country, they don't have the resources either, which is why they're not taking action. Shouldn't be too hard on them. They um it will sound like I'm trying to feather my own nest when I say this. And I suppose I am, in reality. But the reason I started a law firm is because I got advice and was told this is legal work. So I did the right thing. I inquired with QLS, Queensland Law Society, about how is it that some that that I could potentially own a law firm? Is that even something I could do? And back in 2013. Well, back in 2012, when I started making the inquiries, it was not that common for a non-lawyer to own a law firm. So I had to jump through hoops and per prove I was a person of uh um the right character, a fit and proper person. And so I did what I saw as the right thing of meeting the criteria, um, setting up the trust accounts, putting in all the legal management systems, uh, employing the right people, the legal practitioner directors, everything, doing it all right. And it's actually legal staff that do the work, not like other entities out there that might have a law firm, but then none of the work actually goes through the law firm. It's almost like a bait and switch. Um so I incur the additional cost to do this, but I also like the fact that I do it right. And if ASIC and perhaps the uh the um law societies in each state got together, that would probably be a better outcome because then they'd um stop credit reporter credit repairers doing this unless they actually have legal training. And again, my understanding is that you that it is legal work by its very nature. And again, we've published information on that. It would be fantastic if that if the consumers were protected by making sure that the advice they were getting was actually proper legal advice. I don't think it's gonna happen. So where we are at the moment is better than where we were before credit licensing came in for for um credit repairers. I think those who don't do the right thing by creditors, by consumers, sorry, shouldn't be allowed to do what they're doing. Um so I don't really know what will come of the ASIC investigation. They made me jump through hoops when I applied for my credit license. Um I've got some uh reports on my calculator page about how you can save 17 or I think one client saved$27,000 by getting their credit rating repaired because on the SMART, the Smart Money website, I think it is about credit repair, they say that you shouldn't pay anybody to do this, you can do it yourself. And in a perfect world, you can do credit repair yourself if you know the legislation and if the creditors do the right thing and if Africa was actually doing the right thing, in my humble opinion. But in reality, people don't know how to formulate an Africa complaint properly. People don't know the legislation, uh, they don't know how to defend themselves. Uh, you've had some fights with Vodafone and you've documented that along the way. It's been a lot of bloody hard work, hasn't it? 18 months and it's still ongoing. Yeah, absolutely. It's hard work, and not a lot of people have the time and energy to do it, so they put up with it. In a perfect world, if creditors actually, this is interesting. When I first started uh MyCRA before we became My CRA lawyers, I thought the business only had five years of longevity because I thought that as we show the creditors where they're making mistakes, they'll fix their ways so I can't get a default removed. And before long, there won't be any errors. It will be a case of every default's been listed correctly so it can't be removed. And that's the law, that's the case. If the default's listed correctly, it can't be removed. The trouble is we're still getting defaults removed today for exactly the same reasons as we were in November 2009. They haven't made a change. It's ridiculous. And it's not in their interest to change because the compliance cost of actually meeting the Privacy Act minimum requirements would mean that client that creditors probably wouldn't have as much business because the warnings they're supposed to give about the implications of even making an inquiry would scare most people away. And that's in law, but they don't do it.

SPEAKER_01 48:13

It's um it's challenging, and there's so many intricacies, right? Like if you start an application but you don't finish it, or you know, they need to advise you of the impact that this might have on your credit file. Um, you know, I've seen myself like PayPal and P and four is a lot of dodgy shit going on with that.

SPEAKER_00 48:28

Yeah. Uh that's the point though. I mean, uh there was somebody that um came up on Wednesday nights live and asked about a particular creditor. And I hadn't heard of this creditor, so I thought, well, live on the TikTok, I looked them up. And um when I saw their website, I thought, well, that's interesting. And I thought they were going to be the first creditor that I've ever seen that met the requirements. And they were so close. But because they weren't there, they were still miles away. They were doing everything kind of right, but the information they were providing wasn't enough. Uh, they they left out, they put up the NCC information, but they left out the Privacy Act information. So they completely destroyed their ability to realistically report anything on a credit report. So legally, in my view, my humble personal opinion, they can't list an inquiry on a credit file. They can't list a late repayment, they can't list a default because they didn't meet the minimum foundational requirements. That's what creditors do. It's not in their interest because they would, it would, the compliance would cost them too much money. And that's why I think a lot of the credit repairs don't become law firms because the compliance cost is freaking horrendous as a law firm.

SPEAKER_01 49:45

It's expensive and it's a process, and like what you're saying, I mean, they're relying and banking and hoping the ignorance of everyone. I mean, the 27,000 people that follow you, and you know, I love your content and watched it, you know, for years and years, it's really insightful. And I think the more that gets out, it's cool. But it's probably, you know, it's it's it's hard to accept that, you know, 50 or 80% of the country would get passionate about credit repair overnight and challenge the crap coming out of these creditors, right?

SPEAKER_00 50:11

It'd be nice if they did. It's like anything, it's the volume of numbers that would make this change. But I've been looking for there there are there are some other areas I could tackle, but I can't do it on my own. I need to have a client that's actually taking the action. Then, as the law firm, we can help them take that action. We can't institute proceedings ourselves without having a client there. And the trouble is clients don't want to spend the money. They don't want to take the big moves unless it's going to help them. All clients are interested in getting their default removed, getting their credit rating repaired so they can get their mortgage and move on. Um, a lot of clients are vocal about how bad it is while they've got a bad credit rating. As soon as their credit rating's cleaned up, they don't want to talk about it again because that's that part of their life. Oh, that was horrible. I just want to put that behind me. Never worry about that again, never talk about it again. And that makes it difficult to get some of these things changed because having people that are like a dog with a bone and have the passion to get this stuff done, it's rare. Because people are self-focused. We all want to know what's in it for me. How can I help what if I do that, how's it going to help me? Well, normal, that's human nature. And if I can remove their default in a day and they get to move on with their life and get their car loan, their house loan, that's all they care about. They don't care that ABC creditor broke the law and is systemically breaching the legislation because how does that help them? They don't care, they just want to move on.

SPEAKER_01 51:46

Yeah, just the reality of it, but um, it's good to know. And the 9% that you don't get uh, you know, removed you've mentioned on your TikTok lives, you know, creditors lie. Sometimes they do deceive, right?

SPEAKER_00 51:57

Yeah. Um we had a energy company that we requested a copy of the default notice. Um and they sent us a copy of a notice, and there was something not quite right about it, so we requested more information and they sent us a new default notice on a different letterhead. Now, what was interesting is this particular company went through a name change, and the second default notice they sent us had the name of the new company with a date prior to the incorporation of the new company. It was on the letterhead of the second company. So they just make shit up. They don't care, they just make shit up and send it out because the consumer doesn't know how do you prove this stuff? In that particular instance, it was easy to prove because they the um company had not even been incorporated yet. But they do. They a lot of companies don't keep the records they're legally required to keep. So when they send something to a consumer, how can how does a consumer know whether it's real or not? They don't. That just makes shit up.

SPEAKER_01 53:13

Always, yeah. And uh people for things as companies that target the ASIC registry saying pay your renewal fee now.

SPEAKER_00 53:19

Um I got two of those uh this month because I've got two companies, sorry, two business names that are due, I think in March, early April. So they send these notices out way before ASIC. Um well you ASIC don't send you a reminder, it just comes by email. But they send these notices out, yeah. And they try and take advantage of people. They do have a line at the bottom saying this is not an ASIC notice, but how many people notice that? How many people read too long didn't read is a real thing. People get away with it, companies get away with a lot more than they should.

SPEAKER_01 53:54

Yeah, absolutely. Yes, in terms of like big data, obviously, in the debt collection space, there's a lot of it. Um, I mean, you've spoken previously about you know banks trolling Facebook and you can use social media to spy on applicants, uh, which can lead to decline finance. Um, and I guess more deeply uh in terms of the skip tracing industry, obviously people probably don't I'm not quite familiar with it, but I guess what's the legality of these platforms? Do customers have the right to submit a privacy application request to understand what's being held on them and how that's being used and to correct the information?

SPEAKER_00 54:25

Well, the Privacy Act says that um if somebody holds information about you, you have the right to access that information and to and to request a change if it's not right, which coming back to the uh fraud focus group and things like that, consumers don't have access to it. It's secret fraud list. Um if you look at something like Casper, which is one of the big um skip tracing platforms, I've never actually personally seen Casper, but I've got a few friends in the decollection agency uh uh industry that use it. It's just one of a suite of amazing products for what they do, for trying to find people. Um, so I can only give secondhand information about what I've heard it does rather than first hand information. But as far as I'm aware, it can trawl through all of the social media sites. Um, it can gather information and and connect the dots so that you might have said something over here, which allowed the uh the data to be matched to something over here, and like in the movies where they have all these little dots joining up and you know, all the little red strings going from here to here. It kind of does that until they can track down enough information to build a profile to say you are likely to be here, or you are here because we just found something on a someone's social media site. It's pretty scary what they do. Do you have the right to correct it? You probably do. It's I've never been asked that question before about those kind of programs, but you probably would. Would they comply? Probably not, because they would probably think it doesn't um impact them, and then you'd have to have a big bloody shit fight to make them do it. I mean, again, if anybody has ever been inadvertently added to a uh fraud list, oh let me just have a quick look here. I can't reveal too much because it's an ongo it's an ongoing investigation, it's almost like on a copper. Um I'm not, but I was doing some digging the other day into the secret fraud list, and sorry to jump all over the place, mate, but that's my brain, right? Um some of the things that could get you on the secret fraud list are scary as hell. Uh Equifax ID matrix, okay. It can be things as simple as if you have too many inquiries on your credit file, they could they we haven't got it verified yet, but it looks like just having too many inquiries will put you on the secret fraud list. The number of inquiries it's hard to say because the information I've got so far, again, is secondhand and it could be complete nutter bullshit. But we're trying to verify um and the mere fact that it looks like they can say that you're committing fraud just because you may have been potentially in a tough spot and you're looking for a uh a way out by getting a loan, not knowing that every single time you make an inquiry it will do damage to your credit report. The oh geez, where's the other stuff? Um I'll just have to probably just put a balloon over the whole lot and say that some of the stuff that I was given recently damn near makes you cry because it's like, you know, the the oh the the the the 1984 George Orwell's 1984, how big brother's watching. That shit is real today. They really are watching, but how they treat the data is even more scary because they get to say that Ryan lost his job, had a relationship breakup, and went through all sorts of crap, maybe was homeless for a while, but you didn't know how the financial system works. So you went and applied for finance three times a week for six months to try and get out of this bad situation. All you need to do is get some money to be able to go and move on, and then that was the platform to launch. You'd probably be on the fraud list for 15 years because of that. Your life is completely rooted for 15 years because you didn't understand how the system works. How is that fair? How is that fraudulent activity? It might be naive, you know, this this shit should be taught in school. You might have been naive perhaps, but it's not fraud. Fraud has a definition in law, and you know that doesn't meet that definition. So, mate, the system is fucking broken. It really is, and it makes no logical sense to anybody who digs into the system to see how it works, to understand why they would build a system like that. It just doesn't make any sense. Sorry, I went down a rabbit hole there as well, but I thought I had, I actually thought I had everything written out nice and neatly here from my phone notes, but no, they're they're not as clear as I thought they were. Must have just left most of it up here.

SPEAKER_01 59:40

Yeah, yeah. You've said previously as well, uh the bank suspects, you know, uh its expenses are understated potentially or inconsistencies in applications that may contribute.

SPEAKER_00 59:51

Absolutely, yeah. Um if you said to uh on one application that this happened, and then because that's what you interpreted the question to uh you interpreted the question in a particular way, so this is the answer you give, you might being honest. This is how you interpreted the question. And then on another application, and you might you might have been declined on that, on another application you put down that this happened because the question's worded slightly differently. A credit manager could make the determination that hang on, you've got a completely different answer here. They understand what the question is intended to give rather than how the consumer might interpret that question. So they could simply say, nah, this bloke lied, fuck him, he's committed fraud. Put him on the secret fraud list. And that's it. End of story. Now they say that the one of the arguments I heard years ago was that the secret fraud list doesn't have to be reported uh to consumers because it's de-identified. The definition of de-identified is that it can't be re-identified. In the old days, it was my understanding that it was identifiable by your mobile phone number. I don't know if that was the case because think about this, right? I mean, I've had my mobile for ever my mobile number for over 30 years, probably close to 35 years. But a lot of people change mobile numbers on a regular basis. So if there was a dodgy version of Ryan Tan that went out and made a lot of really fraudulent applications and put that mobile number that he had at the time on the application, yeah, right, quite rightly, you might be on the fraud list. But then, oh shit, that was an LD number and it got cut off because I didn't pay the bill. I'll just go and get another LD number, that'd be right. That number goes into a quarantine for 12 months or two years, I can't remember which. But then two years later, that number comes back onto the market, somebody else picks it up and they're starting to use it. They put that number onto an application, it's flagged on the fraud list. So that person now, Mary Smith, is now on the fraud list because it's the same mobile number. So I couldn't verify that that was actually the case because it made no logical sense. But then to find out that just having too many inquiries puts you on the fraud list, well, maybe they do identify and de-identify via a mobile phone. But again, see, in my humble opinion, not a lawyer, my humble opinion is that if it's if the legislation says that it's de-identified information if it can't be re-identified, then how the hell could they use that? It would be completely useless information if it couldn't be re-identified. Does it make sense to you too, Ryan?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:25

Yeah, absolutely. Um yeah, I know you've raised that on your lives before. It doesn't make sense to me, and um, it's not procedural fairness to the list for people who are on the list, they can't correct information for all you know it's a it's a mistake or a misinterpretation, and the fact that that fucks you can't get a mortgage for God knows how long, that's um it's challenging. And I guess look, that plays into the great affairs of digital ID. I know you've been very vocal on that. Um, I guess you know, with all these kind of data sources coming into play and all that, like what's your take on on how this digital ID kind of plays in and all this data aggregation and data matching?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:59

Oh where do I start on that one? Um have you ever dug into how many data breaches there are over here? Not specifically, no. It's probably a podcast we could do one day, mate. The the number of breaches, I did I did a uh a TikTok video on it, and so I started to actually look around and start doing some research on what were the breaches. I think it was late 2024, um, early 2025, and I got the reports on how many data breaches there were, uh small and large. And it was so many that I thought, holy fuck me, drunk. The number of breaches meant that you and I could have been included in all of these different breaches without knowing about it. All right. Um, what's that um website where you can put your um your email address into and it'll see you if you're you've been in a uh data breach? I can't remember what it's called at the moment, but it's anyway the number of data breaches that happen is scary as shit. So if I've just had an ADHD moment and forgotten where it's going, mate. Where was it going with that? No, digital ID and all of that. Thank you, digital ID, yeah. Um so the number of data breaches that happens makes it scary because you've got all of your data with a digital ID, you've got all of your data centralized.

unknown 1:04:22

Right?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:22

Now remember when they started to propose the digital ID? Oh, it won't be mandatory. It's a choice. Really? Okay, well, I always thought, well, that doesn't sound like the government's ever going to give you choice to do anything. Um, but let's say, for instance, it was a choice, we'll get back to that in a minute. When all of your data is centralized and they were going to use the national uh driver's license database as the place uh that they were keeping all of this data. Because again, the national driver's license database is already a big database of your driver's license information. Uh, when I first started reporting it, I I called it a honeypot, but that was actually the wrong term. Uh, I didn't understand what honeypot meant. Now, you think about it if if we've got every person over the age of 14 in this country with a digital ID because it starts at 14, they've got all of your contact details, all of your identity details, um, all of your historical data about identity in one central location. I wonder if hackers would think that was a pretty inviting sort of target. And if hackers can break into military-grade software, do we really think the Australian government's gonna be stronger than perhaps the US military level of encryption? I don't know. I don't have that much confidence. So if we've now got every Australian over the age of fourteen with all the data in one central location and some bastard gets into it, what's gonna happen? It's pretty bloody scary in my humble opinion.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:01

Yeah, absolutely. And Equifax itself, they were hacked at a major data breach all those years ago.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:06

Well, not only once, mate. They've been hacked several times. You only hear about the really big ones, like the Optus and the M uh Medibank and the Latitude, right? But there are so many more hacks and data leaks. Because it doesn't have to be a hack. It could be that some junior IT person did a download of data for their boss, saved it onto the server, but saved it into an insecure location, which meant it was uh published to the web. That's happened so many times. Um your data getting out there is scary as shit. Just today, in fact, behind my little Zoom window here where we're having this podcast right now, I've got the face of a client that I was looking at before we came onto the today's podcast. And this particular client is a well-respected business person who had their identity stolen. Because that person has an uh has a profile and someone decided to have a go and completely destroyed their credit rating with all of these bogus inquiries. And when you look at the profile of this person, there's no way they'd be going for a cash converters loan, but they had caches on the credit file after the data breach. It's pretty scary stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:30

Yeah, it's it's very scary. Um, you know, how the data goes around. I guess you know, data breaches are more common. I guess it's interesting to see people's reactions, you know. Obviously, we had the obdus data breach, and you know, there was noise, you could say, but it hasn't had material impact to the brand. They're still adding customers and people have moved on. I mean, I net had the backdoor breach, I think it was 280,000 uh emails and addresses leaked, but again, the attitude of the community seems to be people just move on. There's not really anyone kind of rigorously going out for compensation or holding these companies to account. So, I mean, maybe it's become the new normal of just, you know, I expect my data to get breached.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:06

And it's scary too because um I think it was New South Wales. Uh talking about a client earlier this week, they wanted to go and change their driver's license number because of a data breach. And I think it was New South Wales, said, no, we don't change your number, we only change your card number, not your actual driver's license number. And there's still a lot of people that don't use their driver's license card number, they just use their driver's licence number for ID, even though the card number is there. So that's scary because if they get your driver's licence number and make a fake license, which unfortunately with modern technology is pretty damned easy to do, because again, they might have all these security um holograms and stuff on the driver's licence. But would you know how a Tasmanian driver's licence is supposed to look if you're in a business and you're taking the driver's license's ID? Of course not. And if you're not a multinational company, you probably don't have the resources to have to have paid the$50,000 connection fee to be able to check that driver's license number to see if it's a real number that isn't uh hasn't hasn't been um part of a an ID fraud, or sorry, uh as as part of a data breach. So unless you have that connection, you have to go on face value that oh, it looks like a driver's license, it looks like you, that looks like Ryan, it's got a number on it, yeah. Same date of birth, he said. But that could be the driver's licence number of somebody that's a completely different Ryan Tan or a completely different person. Because how the bloody hell are you gonna know? Then you extend credit to that person and you get ripped off. So it's when you start digging into it again, it's one of those things, right? When you start digging it, the system's bloody system doesn't work, and the digital ID is going to just make it worse. They say it's not mandatory, but you run a business. Have you ever seen when the um director's ID came in, wasn't mandatory. Sorry, it was mandatory, that's right, it was mandatory. You had to have a director's ID. Uh, otherwise you'd get fined. Apparently, there's a lot of people that don't have a director's ID. I, being a good citizen when you got it got a director's ID straight away. Uh, I don't like the digital ID, but I've got a Medicare, I've got a driver's license, I've got a director's ID, I've got all these other IDs, which effectively they're they've they've built the my profile anyway, without my permission, but I have never signed up for the digital ID per se. Um But when they released this, they said that once the digital ID comes in, you won't be able to get an international flight without having a digital ID. You won't be able to get a domestic flight without having a digital ID. Uh already there are services that I can't use because I don't have a digital ID and I don't want to get one. So how is that not mandatory? Something to think about.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:15

Oh, definitely. Definitely. I mean, yeah, it's very Orwellian. You know, you mentioned 1984 and obviously of the whole COVID thing, you know, it's uh they take away the liberties and the freedoms to then sell them back to you um to push you in the system, and you know, there's obviously benefits, but you can't necessarily disagree that you are forced into it by being locked out of society, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:34

Yeah, no. I mean, anybody that spoke about COVID having anything other than it was the world's most horrible disease during the COVID pandemic was a conspiracy theoried nut. A lot of those theories may or may not have been proven to be uh correct or very close to being correct today. And and if you raise an objection to the digital idea, apparently you're also a lunatic. If when they were first starting to talk about the uh George Orwell's book, I went and got a copy, digital copy, and listened to it as a novel, thinking, what the hell are they talking about? And it's a very interesting book to have a listen to. And at the time I thought, oh, mob of dickheads, right? This is not gonna happen. And it's only a few years ago that I listened to that book. And today, the way things are going, it's bloody scary in how it's almost predicting the future. Will it get to be that bad? Who knows? I doubt it. I mean, we we have a much better lifestyle than they did in that book. But it's scary, as you said, they take our liberties away from us and then we have to earn the right to have back what we used to take for granted automatically. Will we have the social credit scoring system that they talk about? Who knows? Do we already have part of it? Well, if you make too many inquiries, you can't get credit. It's pretty scary. I don't know, mate. It's it's an interesting world that we're moving into. Uh, and we probably shouldn't talk about AI on this particular podcast because it's a whole nother conversation about what's going to happen. But um, yeah, the digital ID is a scary piece of fish, mate.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:26

Absolutely. Yeah, there's so much to it and and to look into. Um, I guess just final topic. Um, obviously, we had robo debt all those years ago, um, and obviously that was you know potentially deemed unconstitutionable, and there was a lot of uh people affected by it. Um, I guess you know, the ATO. Um, I was speaking to Harry Dell on my podcast last year, and um, you know, he he kind of tackles a lot of these big topics, and the ATO is you know, a$55 billion deficit. A lot of that um uh heavy portion is from um you know salaries and wage earners, um, and people just owe money and they're trying to claw that back. Um, ATO has now referred 355,000 people to Recoveries Corp since Jen 2024. Some people say those uh includes welfare recipients with modest debts. People get final notices with seven days to pay, or even get uh less notice than that. I mean, what's your view on this? Uh and Recoveries Corp kind of entering this space. Firstly, they're uh private equity backed, and secondly, they were just found by the Guardian weeks ago to have paid no tax themselves.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:27

Yeah, and um, I have no problem with them paying no tax because if they are in business and their structure and they wouldn't be paying no tax, but if they're in business and have a structure that allows them to take advantage of the Australian tax laws and they're doing it legally, great. If they're not doing it legally, then they should not be working for the ATO. I didn't see the story, but I heard about the story, so I don't know enough about it to say much more on that. Um debt collectors, in and of themselves, whether they be a debt buyer or just a debt collector acting on behalf of the original entity like Credit Rail Recoveries Corp are with the ATO, not all of them have the right ethics, not all of them do the right thing. And if even one of them do the wrong thing that brings harm to a an Australian taxpayer, they shouldn't be allowed to do it. Unfortunately, there's no right answer either, because there are some really, really good people in the debt collection industry that they use psychology to get paid rather than a big stick. They work with the consumer, they work with the taxpayer to find a solution that works for them so they can move forward. Not everybody does that. Interestingly, though, I got a phone call today from the ATO and I don't get them very often, so I was curious as to why they were calling me. And um my accountant tells me, of course, that everything of ours is up to date, and we are up to date. But I got this phone call from Jessica. Probably oversharing here, mate, but I do I love to do this what my lives are like, right? Yeah, um, I got a phone call from Jessica and she said, Well, I want to talk to you about your outstanding obligation. I said, What outstanding obligations? Um, and it happened to be for the law firm, and the law firm is the squeakiest, cleanest entity I've ever had in my entire life because there's actually legislation that says that the law firm has to be. Um, but hang on. Um, like I do on the lives. See ya, Maddie, have a good weekend. Maddie came to work. She's sick as a dog, but she came to work because she was staffed. Really good kid. Uh so uh Did I say Jessica before? Yes. Actually, it's Jacinta. I couldn't read my own handwriting. That's scary. Um anyway, Jacinta said that she wants to talk about the outstanding obligations. I said, What ob what outstanding obligations? And um apparently we lodged our bass, but we hadn't paid the bass. So I got Scott, my accountant on the phone, trying to say, Scott, I got Jacinta on the phone, apparently I haven't paid our bass. He said, Well, it's gonna be coming out of the bank because the ATO takes a direct debit, it's gonna be coming out. Apparently it was due to come out on the 23rd. Today's the 27th. She called me at about 10 o'clock this morning. So 24, 25, 26, 27. Four business days later. So not so if we look at um 20 uh, well, three business days later, because today hadn't finished, three business days later, and the ATO are calling saying you haven't paid your bass. They normally give a business 10 days clear before they chase it up, before it's even overdue because of the delays with B pay and direct debits and all that sort of stuff, right? It's it's maybe it's an unwritten rule, but I was so surprised that after we told you, so okay, well now we'll do a manual transfer today, no problem. I was so surprised that I spoke to Scott about it, and he said, Well, you know, I've never ever seen that, and Scott's been an accountant for a lot of years. He's never seen them chase up a debt so quickly. So if they're doing that for uh the Bass payment, our Bass is pretty small. Um but if they're doing that for our Bass, how aggressive are they going to be against all these poor buggers that have had debts that were marked do not follow up or do not pursue 15, 20 years ago that we're now finding they're starting to follow up and pursue when they told the the the sorry the the taxpayer they wouldn't do that? It's pretty scary stuff. Now, does it say that the ATO is in trouble, they desperately need money, which I don't think is the case, or does it say that the people that are making the rules are more aggressive or looking at this more aggressively than perhaps is the right thing to do? I don't know. What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:13

A good question, and there's obviously nuance to it. I mean, it's reported in a$55 billion deficit. I guess COVID times it delayed with all the grants and things and obviously reduction, but ATO's become hardline on their debt collection, especially with businesses, right? Small business restructuring, insolvency practitioners, all of those things that were just ramping up hard. And then when you look at the data for ATO-initiated court actions and wind-ups, they're through the roof. So I think the ATO's hardline stance right now is they don't give a shit anymore, especially for businesses. They'll just say you pay it or we fucking wind you up. And that's the mentality they're taking for consumers. Probably not as rigorous. I haven't had any experience or heard about it, but yeah, I'm curious to get your view. I mean, how hard can they push? And um, you know, obviously they're still bound, I assume, by like the RG96 debt collection guidelines and and the NCAAP potentially. I mean, what's your take on how far they can push on this?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:07

Well, it's interesting. Um, the debt collectors, anybody that's collecting money is bound by the guidelines. Um, but with with Recovery's Corp, they're bound. But again, most people don't know the rules of the debt collectors' guidelines. I mean, I'm doing a whole series on it right now. I'm releasing a whole series of videos, I think 40 videos in the series about all of the rules within the debt collector's guidelines. But I think it'd be fair to say that most debt collectors bank on the fact that the consumer doesn't know the rules, therefore they can get away with breaking the rules. The debt collection practices of the hard line attitude of the ATO is interesting because, as you said earlier, most of that money is owed by P A Y G, by employed people. But they're taking a much harder line against small businesses. So when you think about that, um some years ago I saw that the figures it was 2.1 million small businesses in Australia. And we, as a small business person, we employ more people than the big businesses do. And yet we get none of the breaks. We get treated like absolute shit by the ATO. The red tape that a small business has to wade through every single day makes it hard to run a business. And then you hear things like what you're saying now, where they're taking a really hard line on small business tax when most of the money is actually owed by the the employees themselves. Um that's another conversation that could go on for a very long time because if every small business in this country just said, fuck, it's too hard, let's move to Thailand, um, the country would be in a big friggin' shithole. It's it makes no logical sense, mate. You can you can probably tell a number of times through this podcast, I've I've stopped and just had to think, fuck no, don't go down that path. Or I'm completely lost for words because when you have an awareness of what's actually happening, it doesn't make sense. The numbers don't add up. The the red string between the pins just can't reach. It doesn't make any sense at all. And let's hope there's an agenda. Let's hope there's an agenda out there that is just too big for me to understand. I'm just not smart enough to get it, perhaps. Because if that agenda doesn't exist, then these fucksticks in power have no clue. We're just going off willy-nilly. It's like the way my brain works. 17,000 thoughts at the same time, which is why I lose track all the time, right? But if they're running the country like my brain works, we're fucked. We are completely fucked because there is no continuity between the left hand and the right hand, let alone all the gaps in between. And that's how it feels most days. Because why would they make legislation here without considering how that's going to affect over here? Why would the ATO purposefully fuck over small business when the small business is the backbone of the country? There's a lot of consumers out there that don't understand small business, right? Because they're the ones that are doing it tough. The the ones on the lower income. They don't understand how small business works. And I'm I'm saying this generally, I don't mean anything disparaging by that. Um, and they're the ones that are doing it tough because they can't afford to have a nice microphone, right? They can't afford some of the nicer things because they just do not physically have the income. But they're also not the ones that owe the fucking money. They're not the part of the the the um taxpayer group that owe the majority of that$55 billion. What about all those people that got involved in the um the uh GST cashback scheme that I did a couple of stories on? They were silly, but again, they didn't know. They were taken advantage of by the dickheads who told them to do it because they didn't understand the laws. They are now being chased up. Well, they did rip off the cut. That was a d that was genuine fraud. Unfortunately, consumers didn't know about they didn't have enough information to make good decisions at the time. But small business is the backbone of this country and they are being about to be fucked over again. Makes no sense to me, mate.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:53

No, no, exactly. Yeah, I covered a lot in that episode with Harry. It was fascinating. I mean, he talks a lot about how they've lost their technical direction. You know, they've got to collect$55 billion. Obviously, they're struggling to get it from the multinationals, they're all loyal up, and it's hard to kind of get anything from them. So where do they go? Salary and wage earners, and small businesses run them through the ground with director penalty notices, and you know, their whole welfare and business has gone to shit.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:16

Yeah, yeah. It it and unfortunately, there's a lot of small business people out there that don't know how to structure themselves either, so that if anything does go belly up, they don't just lose their business, they lose everything because they didn't know what they didn't know, and they don't have the structure to protect themselves. The old days of having a proprietary limited proprietary limited business to protect yourself from the business structure from the from running a business hasn't hasn't been a reality for a long, long time. Um a director's penalty notice is, in my opinion, um I won't say unconstitutional because I've actually read the constitution. But how people say something, it's unconstitutional, which means it's not right, you shouldn't be allowed to do this, is how I see a director's penalty notice. Um but again, see a lot of people are captured by that broad umbrella because of the big scumbags, and it's normally the top end that do it. The top end found a loophole, they fucked over so many employees in one go that the ATO says, okay, let's let's bring in this new thing called a director's penalty notice, and we'll fuck over every director so they can't do that ever again. But it wasn't about every director, it was about the the big ass scumbag that you're talking about a minute ago that lawyers up and they they don't pay their super, they don't pay their POYG, they don't pay entitlements to uh 3,000 employees when one of their companies think, oh, you know what? No, I'm not making my 400% margin on that stuff anymore. I'll just close that business down and just put into administration. I'll sell off all the assets first, I'll I'll make sure that we do this properly so that no one gets a fucking thing. Those arseholes are the ones that destroy business for the rest of us. Yeah. Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:15

Oh, totally. That's where the regulators come in. I mean, you know, they seem to take a hardline stance. Are they sleeping at the wheel? I mean, you see Phoenixing when you look at liquidators' reports, um, you know, you read them. Obviously, you know, if there are cases of Section 588G um insolvency trading, and the business was well aware of that two to three years down the line, it doesn't seem like the courts and ASIC actually pursuing these activities. So the regulation as a whole, as we've spoken about today, across privacy debt collection and everything, there's huge gaps, but there's just not a willingness to kind of tackle these problems. Not even uh maybe we get we're talking too broadly. I don't want to speak for everyone, but it doesn't seem to be a general willingness to kind of take these matters on or even explore what they mean, and that has like you know devastating consequences for everyone.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:00

Well, one of the other things too though is that uh not everybody should be tarred with the same brush because insolvency tra insolvent trading, using that as an example, as a director, you've got an obligation to not trade insolvent. So if you can't pay your bills as and when they fall due, you're technically insolvent. And what does that mean? If you have a cash flow crisis, if your business is otherwise a healthy business, but you have a major cash flow crisis and you can't pay your bills, you're supposed to shut your debt business down, put it into administration, walk away. Staff will lose their jobs and you can't pay because of a small cash flow flow crisis. That if you are a good business person, you can probably work through that and come out the other side. And I know that a lot of businesses do that every single day because that's how you keep your business alive. But technically you're supposed to put into administration straight away. So they the the regulators could take the really hard line and probably close down a lot of businesses that were technically trading insolvent for a short period of time. And that doesn't seem fair to me because again, those rules, those laws, those regulations are designed to protect uh creditors and protect businesses from the big dodgy bastards who are doing the wrong thing. Not from making a small business um who's trying hard to build the business up not protecting from them because they're the ones who are probably trying to do the right thing. They're paying their staff, they don't want their staff to lose their friggin' jobs just because a major creditor didn't pay them, a major debtor didn't pay them, rather. And this is where the laws don't make sense. They are black and white, and like you said, it seems like a lot of the times the regulators don't want to take action, but it seems they want to take action against the little guy, but not the big guy. Or they choose to make an example of this one over here, but they've made one little tiny mistake. It's just they said, fuck it, team meeting, let's find some bastard we can fucking hang our hat on today. Doesn't matter about the circumstances, they just say, Yep, you're the first one that came up, you're fucked. And they they take it to they take it to town, they really do. Again, we see this stuff happening all the time. There are so many inconsistencies. If anybody's ever made a um uh a request of the um the inspector general of taxation to help them out, and then perhaps the inspector general of taxation rules in favor of the consumer or the the the um the taxpayer, then the ATA says, get fucked, you're just an advisory, oh, you don't have to follow your rules. That's reality. They don't. The ATO does not have to follow the recommendations or findings of the Inspector General of Taxation. So what's the point of having the inspector general to taxation? It's there because it looks good, it sounds good, that you have this oversight, except the commissioner and deputy commissioner can say, don't give a fuck. I don't care what they said, I don't care if we did something wrong. We make our own rules, we do what we like. And that is reality. That happens, it genuinely happens. So what's the answer, mate? We're gonna have a great old chat, but what's the answer? You speak to a lot of interesting people. What do you reckon?

SPEAKER_01 1:31:22

Yeah, I mean, it's a multi-pronged approach, right? I mean, I think obviously everyone has a role to play. Like consumers, in my opinion, uh, they should, if I can say should, you know, be interested in these topics, in their rights, uh, dealing with you know, credit debt collectors, all of that. Um and you know, I guess raising like advocacy and um you know, people come together and everyone speaks up. I mean, when people do those things, you know, for a call for role commission or things like that, there are some efforts. So that's what I love what you do, and you know, what I do to a lesser extent is it's out there and spreading the good word, and and you know, that's another thing I'm passionate about as a subdobby, which you kind of alluded to, is you know, dealing with decollectors. A lot of people have this stigma of I'm so worried or scared when I get it. But for me personally, I like to have fun with them. Um, I've had a few back and forths where they've breached the RG96, it's gone through to Afgha, they've then had to, you know, give some crazy action which is well out of it. So treat it like a game and and don't be so scared, understand your rights and um, you know, contribute to advocacy and positive change.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:21

Yeah, I agree, mate. I agree. If more people knew their rights and had the balls to actually stand up for their own rights, I think we'd be living in a with a very different landscape. But people don't. And that's what the creditors take advantage of.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:37

Yeah, absolutely. And just to finish off, some rapid fire questions. Um, first one, free credit report or paid, which one should people get?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:46

Both. Free credit report because it shows at the end of the credit report um other file accesses that shows information that creditors don't see. But the free one, if we're talking Equifax, which is really the only one you should worry about, it doesn't give you a score. So you should also have a paid credit report that gives you a score and the same information that creditors see because they are two different reports.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:06

Beautiful. In terms of credit bureaus, Equifax, the combined Ilion Experian or Creditor Watch, which bureau matters most?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:14

Equifax matters the most. Uh Creditor Watch is uh commercial only. Uh the combined Ilion Experian isn't yet as combined as we thought it was. In fact, I thought from insider information that the two databases had now merged, but we have an Experian credit file from just this week where a Credit Corp open account had been removed. And I said, I actually said to the client, don't worry about getting your Ilion because uh the databases have been merged. And what then one of the um um lawyers said, No, no, we should probably get it just to make sure because they're gonna go for a home loan. I said, Yeah, actually, it makes sense. Um, so the client got the Ilion credit report, and bugger me, the bloody credit corp open account was still on there, and yet we have been told by many sources those two databases were merged. So I've had to retract that and start telling people, no, it looks like it hasn't bloody happened yet. So um, which is the most important? It is definitely Equifax. As you said before, I don't know the numbers, but you said before 85% market share that Equifax has. The um Ilion and Xperian are important for consumers because most major creditors will check all three. If you could only get one, definitely Equifax, you should get all three. And if you're a business person or in commercial entity of any kind, you should try and get a copy of your creditor watch. However, there's no way I've yet found for an individual to get a copy of their creditor watch unless you're a paid subscriber business of Creditor Watch. So it makes it bloody hard.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:55

Yeah, definitely. It's worth noting uh Credit Protect is the new uh Creditor Watch arm of Xperian. They're rolling out that bureau data as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:02

Credit Protect, you now know something that I don't know. So Credit Protect?

SPEAKER_01 1:35:06

Yeah, I think I told you on the live um a few months ago, it's called Credit Protect. They've I did some research on it. It turns out, because they marketed themselves as a new bureau, but it turns out they've taken the combined uh Ilian, Experian commercial bureau and they've just mixed it together.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:23

Yeah, Ilixperian, you said Creditor Watch though.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:26

The Creditor Watch competitor. So Ilion now. Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. Yeah.

unknown 1:35:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:31

I don't know whether it's good or not, I can't speak. I've had limited experience, but what I've seen, um, you know, when you pull those files, Creditor Watch is interesting. But I think my personal opinion is Equifax Commercial Bureau is the best just because of the breadth and depth of data that it does have.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:45

Well, again, it it depends what you want why you're pulling it. If you're a creditor and you're looking to check out the validity or the uh risk factors of lending someone money or giving them credit, well, that's a completely different story to if you're a consumer and which credit report do you pull? So it's um, I suppose it's content specific or circumstance specific which is best. We deal mainly with consumers. So from a consumer point of view, definitely Equifax. Um, if you're a business, then you should probably get all three. Absolutely. Oh, four, all four, because Lilion and Experian aren't joined properly yet. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:25

How often should someone check their credit file?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:27

You're legally able to get a free copy of a credit report every three months. And you should do that because just from the identity theft issue alone or identity fraud alone, probably most people in Australia have been the victim of some kind of data breach now. And it only takes one wrong actor to get that data and they could start making applications to credit in your name. You won't know about it until you get declined or you have a debt collector knocking on your door for a large debt you know nothing about. Whereas that will become evident if you get a copy of your credit report every three months.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:03

Perfect. Hardship provisions, are they a lifeline or a trap?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:08

Both. They're a lifeline because unless you use them, your credit file is completely screwed. They're a trap because some people use them too early and think of it as, oh, well, I'm I want to go to the pub this weekend, so I'll use the hardship provisions and make up this lovely story about how hard my life is. They don't realise it destroys your credit rating.

unknown 1:37:28

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:29

It's not supposed to. The idea of it is it's supposed to protect your credit rating, but it doesn't because the way the data is interpreted by the creditors is, oh look, hardship. Oh, one, two, three, four months. Blake didn't pay his mortgage for four months. Clearly, you're a bad risk.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:44

Yeah, but what's the most outrageous case that you've handled?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:49

Oh, there are far too many to have one outrageous one. So what I fall back on is we removed a default for I think the number was six hundred and for million dollars for a single default. Now, how can someone have a$644 million default? Because it was reported incorrectly. They put the wrong freaking numbers in. From memory, I think they put the account number in the dollar value field when they reported the default. Complete fuck up. But it still showed on the credit file. Clearly, we got it removed. It wasn't that hard because as soon as we pointed out the error, they removed it. But um, I actually went looking for it the other day because um someone asked this a very similar question on the live, and I'm gonna go and find it. As far as I know, it's published on the blog, but I can't find the bloody thing. But yeah, 644 million, that's ridiculous. Uh, the late repayment history for just a few cents, the about the broker I was talking about earlier, that's ridiculous. That can destroy someone's credit rating completely for being just a few cents behind in your mortgage one month. But the way the system works, the creditor is legally obligated to report it. They don't make the rules on how that data is going to be interpreted. They could only make the rule uh they could only comply with the law that said they had to report the fact that the that the uh the debtor didn't pay their payment on time. It's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:11

Yeah, crazy. Um and last one, if the government called you in as an advisor on credit reform tomorrow, what would your first recommendation be?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:21

Make a minimum um set of rules around uh late repayment history. So a minimum amount they're allowed to report, like there is with uh defaults, it's$100 for commercial,$150 for consumer. I think it should be the same thing. There should be a minimum that you have to be behind on your debt before they're allowed to report yours late repayment. Uh and put more rules around it. That they've got to notify you before they uh report it. Because otherwise, at the moment, I mean, I had this conversation with some creditors that the creditors don't contact you if you're behind in your payment unless it's behind by this much. I think with the one entity I was talking to, they they wouldn't contact you unless you're at least 50 bucks, right? But if you're five cents behind, they have to report you as a late repayment. But they don't even internally want to talk to you unless you're 50 bucks behind. So the left hand doesn't understand what the right hand is doing, or they don't care, or they just have no no no concept of the damage it does. So, yes, it would definitely be put more strict rules around how late repayment history is recorded and what the creditor must do before they re report it.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:33

Fantastic. And just lastly, for people who want to get in touch with you, Graham, um, you know, you're on the socials. How can people get in touch and uh repair their credit with my CRA?

SPEAKER_00 1:40:42

Uh TikTok is at MyCra Lawyers. Uh, we are on YouTube at MyCra Lawyers. You can find me on the web at myCRALYS.com.au. Um, if you put in MyCra Lawyers anywhere on the web, um you'll you'll be able to find me. Graham Dossell. I think I'm the I think I'm still the only Graham Dossell in the entire world. I've done some searches, a little bit of vanity, but I think I'm the only Graham Dossell in the entire world. So if you're looking for Graham Dossell, it says on the screen what how you spell my name. No one ever gets it right. So feel free to try and find me. Uh my team will help you out. We'll give you a um uh no-holes barred interpretation of your credit report, let you know what your options are, then it's up to you. We don't push you. You know, we won't get rich if we get your money, we won't go broke if we don't. So we'd rather just tell you the truth. And if you want to, if you can't afford our services, we are a law firm, we're going to be more expensive than the dodgy buggers. If you can't afford our services, just jump on the TikTok live, ask questions, and you know, go and check out check out our Google reviews. Quite a number of those are people who have said thank you just because they've fixed their own credit ratings just by asking questions, watching and listening and watching the videos we put out. So yeah, that's probably the best way to find me.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:54

Yeah, awesome. Well, yeah, pleasure speaking to you, Graham. I've followed your work for years. I love your work and your authenticity and you know everything that you're bringing to the space. So thank you very much for coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:03

Thanks for letting me be here, Ron. I really appreciate it. You're doing a great job as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:07

Thank you.