Credit Data and Your FCRA Rights

1. What Banrox Is in This Picture

There are three roles in the credit reporting system, and Banrox holds none of them.

Banrox is a viewer that you point at your own file. We display it, alert you when it changes, and explain what the entries mean. We cannot add to it, remove from it, or change it, and neither can anyone who tells you they can.

2. The Authorisation You Give Us

Before we obtain anything, you give a separate written authorisation that says, in substance: you instruct Banrox and its consumer reporting agency partners to obtain your consumer report and score, on an ongoing basis while your account is open, so that Banrox can display them to you and alert you to changes. That authorisation is shown on its own, is not bundled into the Terms of Service, and is not pre-ticked.

You may withdraw it at any time in your account settings or by writing to [email protected]. Withdrawal stops future pulls and stops monitoring. It does not delete history the bureau holds, because that history is theirs, not ours.

To obtain your file we and our partners must verify that you are you, which is why you are asked for your Social Security number, date of birth, address and identity questions. That information is used for verification and file retrieval, and for nothing else. See the Privacy Policy.

3. Soft Pull and Hard Pull

Where a Banrox page says "soft pull, no credit impact," it is describing the inquiry Banrox makes. It is not a statement about what a lender will do after you click through to apply.

4. About the Scores You See

There is no single credit score. There are many models, and lenders choose which one to use.

• The score shown in Banrox is labelled with its model and the bureau it was calculated from. Read that label. It is the only thing that makes the number meaningful.
• An educational score is built to help you track direction. A lender may use a different model and see a different number for the same file on the same day, and that is normal, not an error.
• A score can move for reasons that have nothing to do with anything you did, including a change in another account's reported balance or a model update at the bureau.
• No company can promise a score increase, and Banrox does not. Anyone who promises you a specific score outcome for money is describing something the law does not allow them to promise.

5. Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act

These rights come from federal law. They are free. You do not need Banrox, or any paid service, to use any of them.

• A free report. You are entitled to a free copy of your credit report from each nationwide bureau at annualcreditreport.com, the only site authorised by federal law. You are also entitled to a free report after an adverse action, and if you are unemployed, on public assistance, or believe your file contains fraud.
• Dispute anything inaccurate. The bureau must investigate, normally within 30 days, and must delete or correct information it cannot verify. Disputing is free.
• Know who looked. Your file lists who obtained it and when.
• Adverse action explanation. If a company denies you or prices you worse because of your report, it must tell you and name the bureau it used.
• Security freeze. You may freeze and unfreeze your file at each bureau, free, which blocks most new credit being opened in your name.
• Fraud alert. You may place a free one year fraud alert, or a seven year extended alert with an identity theft report.
• Identity theft block. Information resulting from identity theft can be blocked from your file under 15 U.S.C. section 1681c-2 once you provide an identity theft report.
• Limits on old information. Most negative information drops off after seven years, and most bankruptcies after ten.
• Damages. You may sue a bureau, a furnisher, or a user of your report that violates the Act.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes the official "Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act." Read it at consumerfinance.gov. We will also mail you a paper copy free of charge if you ask at [email protected].

6. How to Fix an Error, Free, Without Paying Anyone

Banrox charges nothing for any of this and never will. A paid service cannot make a bureau do anything it is not already required to do for you at no cost. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you your own free rights.

1. Get your report from annualcreditreport.com so you are looking at the source, not a summary.
2. Write down exactly what is wrong and why, and gather anything that proves it: a statement, a payoff letter, a police report.
3. Dispute with the bureau that shows the error, online, by phone, or by mail. Mail with a return receipt gives you proof of the date.
4. Dispute with the company that reported the item as well. Doing both is what triggers the furnisher's own investigation duty under 15 U.S.C. section 1681s-2(b).
5. Keep everything. If the bureau does not fix a verifiable error, complain to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at consumerfinance.gov/complaint, which forwards it and requires a response.

7. What Banrox Does Not Do With Credit Data

• We do not sell your credit report, your score, or anything derived from them, to anyone, at any price.
• We do not include credit report contents in a referral to a provider. A referral carries only the contact and product interest fields listed in the Privacy Policy.
• We do not use your credit data to target advertising to you.
• We do not dispute anything on your behalf, and we do not charge for dispute help.
• We do not obtain a report about anyone other than the person who authorised it, and obtaining a report without a permissible purpose is a federal offence which we treat as grounds for immediate termination and referral to law enforcement.

8. Accuracy and Availability

What you see in Banrox is what the bureau gave us at the time of the pull. Bureaus update on their own schedules, a lender may report on a cycle that has not closed yet, and outages happen. A figure in Banrox that differs from a figure at the bureau means the bureau's figure is the current one. If you see a discrepancy that matters, pull the report at the source and use that.

Banrox is not liable for a decision you make based on a display that was accurate when retrieved and has since changed at the source. That is not a disclaimer of our duty to show you the data correctly; it is a statement about who holds the master copy.

9. Questions

Write to [email protected] or call (888) 888-6401. For a complaint about a bureau, a furnisher, or about Banrox, see Complaints, Disputes and Regulator Contacts.