Manipulation and abuse of the consumer credit reporting agencies

This paper will present a number of loopholes and exploits against the system of consumer credit in the United States that can enable a careful attacker to hugely leverage her (or someone else's) credit report for hundreds of thousands of dollars. While the techniques outlined in this paper have been used for the personal (and legal) profit by a small community of credit hackers, these same techniques could equally be used by more nefarious persons --- that is, criminals willing to break the law, engage in fraud, and make o with significant sums of money. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on these exploits, to analyze them through the lens of the computer security community and to propose a number of fixes which will greatly reduce the effectiveness of the exploits, by both those with good and ill intentions