I got a letter in today’s mail from an auto dealer a few towns away. The beginning reads:
The rest is a sales pitch for their wonderful cars with their great financing.
I don’t mind getting unsolicited advertising (not much, anyway), but I am very bothered by the accuracy of their information. I have no idea what interest rate I’m paying, but the dollar figure quoted is indeed the exact amount I’m paying monthly (rounded to the nearest dollar).
How can they know that? How do they know my credit information? I thought this information is supposed to be private, available only when I specifically allow it. I know there are exceptions for businesses that I worked with in the past, but that’s not the case here.
Can anyone tell me what’s going on? How can this be legal? If it matters, I’m in New Jersey.
Is the auto dealer your got the junk mail from the same make as the car you have the loan through?
In other words. Do you have a GMAC loan and got the junk mail from Chevy dealership?
Did you lease your car from VW and got junk mail from another VW dealership?
That’s my guess. The dealership probably just bought a list of names in the area of people that are in the middle of a loan so they could try to buy the car back and get them into a new one.
They could probably even set restrictions. Say, people that owe between 5000 and 7000 on a car that’s less then X years old with between this and this APR. Whatever they want. Then they can come up with an easy mailer to send out to everyone (or a macro to run so it customizes it to each person), but they only get the names they’re interested in.
They don’t need all the John Doe’s that have a 10 year old car with $12,000 still owed on it, for example.
This is apparently fairly expensive - or is now - as I don’t seem to get stuff like this as much anymore (don’t have any auto loans anymore either).
Mortgages - that data is pretty much public record - and I swear I’ve probably gotten close to 100 customized - somewhat official looking notices to refinance my house (some sort of trying to hint they are from my bank).
It is possible too that depending on what state you live in - that the secured loan - and the way it is recorded was gotten from the DMV/MVA, but I’m guessing in your case it was the credit bureau (although I don’t think they have interest rate info , but they could reverse the data to come up with it).
I guess I could’ve mentioned that in my first post. I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Current car is a GMC Envoy, and the letter is from a Subaru dealership. There’s a lot I don’t know about cars, but I’m pretty confident that there is no parent company that owns both GMC and Subaru.
Legally? I thought no one was supposed to be able to know who I owe money to. Even the mortgage is private info (or so I thought), although I concede that the sale and the price would be public.
Even if there’s no privacy about who I owe money to, surely the dollars amounts can’t be public, can they? Haven’t we been told many times that there’s no need to put a “lock” on our credit reports, because the credit agencies aren’t allowed to give out that info without our permission anyway?
Well I can find your mortgage (or at least I could if you lived in my state) - it’s all there for public inspection and recorded.
I couldn’t find your car loan.
You do get credit card offers - don’t you? Those aren’t sent to everyone - they have targeted lists that they get from the credit bureaus. What you got is basically a fancier form of that.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think that information (the specific rate and payment info) come from the credit bureaus. You can get that information from a credit report (which would be a hard pull on your bureau), but, in my experience, not from the bureaus’ pre-approval marketing files (which are different, and are a soft pull on your bureau).
I haven’t worked with the bureaus on this stuff in a few years, and I wasn’t on the auto side, so my information may be wrong or out of date, but I would suspect that is coming from somewhere else.
It’s been a while since Ive looked into these in any detail, but the law requires that they make a “firm offer of credit” - if they do - it is totally legal.