CIFAS correspondence
(Capitalisation and spelling are as in the original documents)
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 20:30:34 +0100 (BST)
Message-Id: <199906161930.UAA15609@www.users.dircon.co.uk>
Subject: borrowerstale
From: cifas@cifas.org.uk
To: repossession at bigfoot dot com
i have read the information about cifas on your website and as the director of cifas, am duty bound to advise you that your information is incomplete and does not provide a full or accurate picture of how cifas operates.
if you give me an address i will be happy to supply you with fuller details so you can offer more accurate information on your website. we publish a number of leaflets and brochures which explain what data is held and how consumers can obtain a copy of their file. there is nothing secret or underhand about the way cifas operates and we are completely open about cifas and the £135m of fraud it helped to prevent in 1998.
all the data is held by the uk's 3 credit reference agencies, experian, equifax and mcl software. the cifas office in london does not hold the cifas data, because the way lenders access the data is via credit reference agencies. the cifas office in london is just an administrative office.
the public have a right to a copy of their credit file from credit reference agencies if they wish, and this will automatically include any cifas data. if a consumer is unhappy about any cifas data, cifas operates a consumer complaint resolution service. our leaflets describe these services and i hope you will avail yourselves of the chance to gain a fuller understanding so the data on your website can be less misleading.
CIFAS director 
(censored due to CIFAS's legal threats)
director-cifas
The Home Repossession Page replied:
Good morning,
Thank you for your email.
I was very concerned to read that you felt the information on The Home Repossession Page web-site was innaccurate. The point of the web-site is to bring openess to the procedures and consequences that arise from mortgage-related problems. Naturally, I would be grateful for any information that corrects any innaccuracies and allows the mortgage-buying public to understand precisely the role of each party in mortgage-related transactions.
I welcome your offer to do this.
In order to aid clarity I suggest we deal individually with each of the three points (innacuracy, incompleteness, misleading content) that you made in your email.
One difficulty that I suspect you will face in dealing with this is that the information we have published on CIFAS appears on several pages on the web-site (with additional mentions of the organisation on others). However, the bulk of what we have published is contained in the page titled CIFAS, in the Blacklisted? section.
As a result of your email I have re-read that page and found that the end of one sentence was not rendered in some web browsers. I have therefore updated it. You may wish to re-read the page and change any comments you have in the light of those changes.
I suggest that we initially address the most serious of your complaints - that the published information is innaccurate. I have enclosed the text of the main page about CIFAS below and ask you to highlight any error of fact you find in it and return it to me by email.
I will then review your comments and respond with any queries I have.
The text of the page after my edit tonight is as follows:
Home Repossession Page note: we've not shown the page because it is not terribly different to the page that is up today and because it distracts from the flow of this document.
If you feel that other pages on the site contain innaccuracies, I encourage you to copy their text into your reply email, to add any comments you have - perhaps in brackets to highlight them - and to forward them to me.
In approaching the innaccuracy issue like this, we can quickly resolve any outstanding issues.
Turning to your complaint that the material is misleading, I recommend that you compile a list of all the misleading elements in the published material. Upon receipt of that list, I will review it and contact you with any questions I have.
Finally, with regard to your claim that the site does not give full information. I did have an opportunity to pick up CIFAS's literature when I tried to serve a subject access rights notice on you and am unaware of any significant aspect of CIFAS's operations that I have missed out in my description of events. However, I welcome additional information and advise you to compile a list of significant facts that you feel the site has omitted.
In closing, allow me to stress again how concerned I am that the information published on the site should be accurate. Unlike traditional publications, I do encourage published material to be modified as situations change and for readers to be able to input information. I am aware that this opportunity can be daunting but I think its advantages outweigh any disadvantages. I therefore welcome the opportunity you have given me to verify the information contained within the site. As part of this philosophy may I point out that the CIFAS page contains a link to a feedback form that will allow you to add your own comments to the page. I reserve the right to edit these comments for innaccuracy, "advertising", commercial misrepresentation, and foul language.
I propose that once we have cleared up and agreed the three complaints you have made, that I arrange to visit your offices and pick up any new literature you may have produced.
Regards,
Lee
We summarise CIFAS's criticisms and point out one or two little problems with them.
(Censored due to Cifas's legal threats) went on to demand that we remove his name from this site, saying that we had gathered and published it without his permission. He didn't attempt to explain how he thought it was acceptable that his company should be doing exactly the same thing to hundreds of thousands of people.
He claimed he received malicious phone calls as a result of our publishing his name. But:
- he said he hadn't mentioned the calls to BT - even though BT runs a malicious caller filtering and tracking service
- he couldn't explain how the callers worked out which of the 68 (Censored due to Cifas's legal threats) s in the English telephone directory at the time was him
- he couldn't explain why the caller was more likely to track him through this web-site - where his home address is not mentioned - than through the public record of his home address on the Companies House records of his CIFAS directorship
- he didn't report the calls to the police - even though harrassment is a criminal offence
- he had no response to our pointing out that, with the callers having had to call many of the other 68 (Censored due to Cifas's legal threats) s to find him, BT would have a good record from which to track down the criminals and bring them to justice
- he ignored our request to meet to discuss the damage CIFAS sometimes does to innocent people
- he also committed the cardinal sin of asking our ISP to censor the site before he approached us