Credit reporting agency Equifax provided erroneous credit reports for millions of people who took out loans over three weeks in early spring, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing agency executives and people familiar with the case.
Between mid-March and early April, Equifax sent the wrong data to banks including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial, among others, about customers who applied for mortgages, credit cards or car loans.
In some cases there was a variation of up to 20 points in the report.
Car dealerships in Colma, California. Bloomberg via Getty Images
The company blamed it on "a technological coding problem", which it began to solve as of May, and guaranteed that it did not alter the credit information of consumers in their records, according to the newspaper.
"For those consumers who did experience a score change, initial analysis indicates that only a small number of them may have received a different credit decision," CEO Sid Singh said in a statement.
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Equifax CEO Mark Begor, who acknowledged the error during an investor meeting in June, said an issue in "legacy applications resulted in some scores coming out with incorrect data."
The agency, which manages credit information of some 200 million people in the United States and sells it to entities that lend money, suffered a computer attack in 2017, which caused the data of some 150 million customers to be exposed.
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Begor said that in this case "the impact will be quite small."
"It is not something that is significant for Equifax," he concluded. But thousands of people were harmed by misinformation, according to the newspaper: the scores of 18% of credit applicants during that period were wrong, and 10% of Potential car buyers were affected by the ruling.
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Banks and other lenders asked Equifax for more information about the problem to identify customers who were denied credit or offered a very high interest rate, according to knowledgeable sources cited by the newspaper Some are considering offering rejected loans.