Consumer complaint received 2018-07-23
Company: Experian Information Solutions Inc.
State: AZ
Product: Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports
Sub-product: Credit reporting
Issue: Problem with fraud alerts or security freezes

Complaint:
I've tried multiple numbers and methods to get a human from the Experian system ( try XXXX XXXX XXXX for example ). The automated system requests personal information to validate you ( ie zip code, SS, etc ) and will not let you speak to any human. 

This is my problem : Roughly 2 years ago I was a victim of ID theft. I was able to add extended ( multi-year ) fraud alerts to all 3 bureaus but at least one of them ( Experian ) did not record my phone  number in order to allow me to be reached ( or at least this is what I managed to determine from XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXX XXXX XXXX ). The result is that I can't get a credit card that uses Experian for validation because I can't find any way to add my phone number to their system. I also tried submitting my ID with a request to their UPLOAD address to make this change, and the reply came back : " We were unable to honor your request. '' From what I can see, I have no way to use my credit to obtain new credit, and no way to contact the company responsible for this. I would expect in this modern day and age there should be some way to address this simple issue by phone or email ( or their own internal upload system ) but they have made correspondence with their company literally impossible ( except perhaps by snail mail ).

I would expect it is illegal to control consumer 's credit and not permit the consumer to communicate with the company, so I was hoping you could help me address this issue, and I thought you might find this behavior interesting.

Thank you for your assistance. I have a 10 digit reference number ( useless for contacting Experian ) as a result of the " We were unable to honor your request '' reply, if you would care to have access to that. I'd like to further add ( and perhaps there is a second complaint issue here ) that their " upload '' section is insane. It appears to be clearly designed to keep 99 % of the people out. It has a requirement that the files uploaded must be either TIFF in black and white only, or a PDF. How many people do you know can take a picture of their licence or other ID, take the ( likely JPG file ) and convert it to PDF? You can forget the black and white TIFF, because nothing will be legible from that. It looks like a B/W photocopy - nothing is identifiable. Can YOU make a PDF from an image on your phone? Does this seem like a reasonable demand to you?

Adding further to that - here is what I went through attempting to use their " upload '' service. First, I tried uploading the JPG from the phone - Experian reported only TIFFs are supported. I then tried converting to ( color ) TIFF ( the files are huge BTW ). It reported a maximum of 15 MB is supported so these are not acceptable uploads. I then brought it into XXXX XXXX and shrunk the resolution of both images and uploaded again. It then states the TIFF MUST be B/W. I converted the TIFFs to B/W and noted that they were illegible. I then went back to the original images, brought it into XXXX XXXX, resized them to fit on a page, printed as PDF and saved the file to upload. Net result? " We are unable to honor your request ''. Does this seem reasonable to you as a guardian of consumer information? 

-XXXX

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with non-monetary relief