1. a notice that they needed more time to handle my complaint, and then on the deadline to respond
2. 650 words that can be summarized as
a) "Experian Consumer Services" is not the same as Experian, the credit reporting agency
b) The terms of service allow Experian Consumer Services to do what they want
c) You are already unsubscribed from emails from our partners
Regardless, I'd suggest everyone else affected by this issue file a complaint as well. At the very least, these complaints are not cheap to process.
The FTC is also increasingly looking into dark patterns and is at least fining people for them, maybe worth submitting there as well as the Stanford Dark Patterns Tip Line so it gets more notoriety
I have a free Experian account that I look at every few months.
Every time I log in, a big, disorienting interstitial appears and pitches me on Experian CreditWorks Premium ($25/month), with fields asking for my credit card info. It's designed like it's part of a normal registration/login process that you're supposed to fill in. You have to scroll down past all of it to the bottom of the page and click the washed-out, kind-of-disabled-looking button that says "No, keep my current membership", at which point they reluctantly take you to your normal account overview page.
The problem is that they don't blatantly violate any of the policy bullets in that FTC press release... all the terms are spelled out in the interstitial. The issue is that the design goes out of its way to give it a very mandatory vibe. I don't log in very often, but I always have to catch myself ("...wait, what is this? Do I have to do this?"), and then remember to go hunting for the NoThanks button. It has a very opt-out feel.
Let the regulator evaluate if they want to take action. Not filing a complaint guarantees no action will be taken. Filing the complaint takes <5 min. My two cents.
I'd guess that if they get a lot of reports, they will generally pay closer attention to that entity.
The consumer commission in Australia openly notes that there are lots of individual cases with which they can't assist, but still request reports regardless. Helps them keep a finger on the pulse.
Awesome, you were just quite knowledgeable so I was curious. Flagging that if you ever are passionate about government service, FTC is recruiting for a new office of Technology (I also don't work there but have many friends in the public interest tech community).
> Not filing a complaint guarantees no action will be taken.
What a lousy system of regulation, then.
I feel like you'd be more effective finding someone (or twenty someones) that work in their IT department on LinkedIn and explaining to them that working to enrich such an outfit is a scumbag move.
Hit them where it hurts. Government regulators are not it for these fully integrated parasites.
I feel like, if the government regulated the CRAs rather than the other way around, Equifax wouldn't exist or in any case have a license to collect credit data after what they did.
Beyond the inconvenience, it's ultimately just insulting. I can only imagine the number of decimal places at which conversions budged upward from such a transparently belligerent implementation of a modal, and yet some miserable product manager made the call to ship it. What an utter waste of everything that went into producing such a wretched, parasitic product.
Have I mentioned I don't particularly like Experian?
Yes, every time I do a double take. My brain is thinking should I press the button that looks disabled or should I press this shiny looking button here...
I experienced the same nagware screen. It was suspicious that the "No, I don't want to upgrade" button would be replaced by the "Yes, please take my money" button at just the time a user would be clicking to decline.
Those upsell marketing emails without unsubscribe links because they are "account related emails" are the worst. I quickly solved the problem by marking everything from Experian as spam, but I can't think of another service where I've gone searching for an unsubscribe link and haven't found one. Their messaging at the bottom of these emails for anyone who is curious:
"This is not a marketing email — you’re receiving this message to notify you of a recent change to your account. If you’ve unsubscribed from Experian CreditWorks℠ Basic emails in the past, don’t worry — you no longer receive newsletters or special offers."
Checking my spam folder, it looks like I've already received two of them this calendar month.
I signed up for an Experian account in order to correct a mistake on my credit report-- They had listed a bank account under my name that was created well before I was born, and it was tanking my credit rating.
Unfortunately I used my main email to sign up (to correct their mistake) and started getting those non-unsubscribable emails shortly after. So insulting. I did end up fixing it by changing my account email address to fuckyou@experian.sucks, though.
That website says the "experian.sucks" domain is available... for US$1999.
A bit "ouch" pricing wise, but it sounds like someone could potentially take over the accounts of anyone using @experian.sucks for their email address.
I've tried to do this, and everything seems oriented toward reporting fraud and scams, rather than CAN-SPAM violations. I had this issue with Comcast/Xfinity not honoring my opt-out requests for months, and only stopped it when I managed to get on the phone with some kind of supervisor (it pays to be nice to rank-and-file call center employeees!) and bluffed them with calm but stern threats of "legal action".
IANAL, but here's some FTC guidance on this, which I read (again IANAL) to say that the transactional-vs-marketing determination is not up to the sender but up to the recipient and if they "reasonably... would likely conclude" that it is marketing. Unfortunately the guidance is just about the subject line, so Experian might be toeing the letter of the guidance.
I'm not quite sure what the legal enforceability is of the this sort of guidance, but at least with small senders when they try to pull this trick I send them this page and then I no longer receive any of these emails from them.
The "not a marketing email" blurb in the footer where they know you are looking for an unsubscribe button is the marketing email equivalent of "I'm not touching you!" (imagine this being said by a 10-year-old you've just asked nicely to stop touching you, holding a finger an inch from your skin). Not exactly the behavior of someone who thinks the recipient wants to be receiving these emails, is it? The presence of the "this is technically not spam" disclaimer alone tells me this behavior should result in big, big fines. Too bad I'm not the one evaluating these very clear cut cases. I wish terrible things on those pieces of shit who run Comcast.
The ones I'm seeing lately are legitimately neither marketing nor transactional. Instead they're teaching me how to avoid phishing scams and stuff (not asking me to buy anything, but asking me to do things). I feel like the rule ought to be "offer an unsubscribe link unless it's transactional" but instead it's "offer an unsubscribe link if it's marketing".
It’s a shame this doesn’t apply to mobile notifications. I leave Uber and DoorDash alerts on for obvious reasons, which they use to tell me I have $1 off my next $70 order or whatever. I think they’re even time sensitive.
I don’t allow notifications from Uber. If I’ve requested a ride, I leave the app open to track progress. But their notifications are mostly spam so they aren’t allowed on my phone.
What a coincidence I was trying to figure out a way to turn this off today. I figured there was some notification settings on the app to only enable actual ride/delivery notifications rather than daily $1 off spam, but nope, nothing.
Yea, these emails are maddening. The subject (“..it's time to check in on your credit”) and body (“It's a good idea to sign in regularly to make sure your credit report and FICO® Score* are accurate.”) don’t even contain anything useful. They arrive once a month for me seemingly on a timer.
You can write filter rules but then they go and change the subject on you.
I wish emails could have an accurate topic ID or something to more easily target filter rules but that would require a cooperative relationship with the sender, so…
A bank in UAE spams me with marketing emails and there's no unsubscribe link in them. The only way to unsubscribe is to send an SMS from your "registered mobile number" to a short number, so it obviously only works for UAE carriers. Problem is, my "registered mobile number" with them is from another country. I don't even have a working UAE SIM card right now.
Well, then you’re technically knowingly accessing someone else’s account. Which, I’m not a lawyer, but that also sounds like you’re opening yourself up to an (admittedly small) chance of criminal fraud.
You are wasting your time only. They have special partnership with ESPs and they don't consider your "spam" signal as meaningfull. Same applies to emails from most banks, Facebook emails, Ebay emails, etc.
> Hi Andrew. We review communication preferences periodically and noticed you‘ve opted to only receive account related communications. A quick update can give you access to additional information about products and services, as well as special offers available to you. Click “Get Started” to update your email preference settings for: XXXXX. If you‘re satisfied with your current settings, no action is required.
Of course I'm satisfied with my current settings. That's why I went out of my way to set them. Don't send me spam mail asking me to sign up for more spam mail.
I'm not sure how I could possibly have made it more clear that I only want to receive account related communications? And yet they intentionally violate that, just to ask me to sign up for more emails I already told them I didn't want.
Somewhat similarly, I've noticed a major uptick in the last few years of email messages from places I do business with (including banks), that have no "unsubscribe" or "manage preferences" link at the bottom, instead usually having verbiage to the effect of "you shall receive these communications until we part ways" (which technically is in agreement with CAN SPAM, I think) where the content is entirely non-transactional. Not about something I did, not a periodic account statement, nothing like that. Just informational garbage like how to be aware of scams.
I'm totally fine with this sort of email upon opening an account, or if a policy changes, or maybe even annually. But I'm talking about a deluge of this crap, from all sorts of companies I otherwise enjoy doing business with.
I've had the same issue! I went back through my email for the past 3 months and here's a couple with no unsubscribe:
* Google Calendar now shows less spam
* AT&T asking me to update my email preferences, when I explicitly opted out of and disabled a lot of things on that account
This was in the past 3 months. So they're quite rare emails to get but are so infuriating. They're usually from larger companies, with quite a few from Google et al. itself.
I know we shouldn't have to do this but I've been quite happy with gmailctl tool to manage filters via cli. So nice to send all future mail from a place to some label and out of my inbox with using the awful GUI.
This is one reason I really like Hey[0]. Putting aside your feelings for 37signals, the service itself is great for putting an end to this dumb marketing spam. Nothing is allowed into my inbox until I explicitly allow it.
There are a few companies that send marketing mail from their root domain (where I would also get password-resets, etc) so I cannot as easily block them, but then I tend to block the sender directly. That's one benefit of companies adopting a "people first persona"; the marketing emails all come from "Mary" or "Jonas" @ company.com. Blocked!
Don't get me started on Experian. Their core service is providing credit scores to lenders. Years ago, I went through a rigorous process to clean up my credit, something which took months but was at least honest on their part.
Then they began erecting hurdles, such as a neverending stream of rejection letters requesting further detail when trying to investigate a report. I knew at that point weren't being above board because one of the companies on my credit report had gone spectacularly out of business during the 2008 financial crisis (Countrywide... Remember them?). This company was no longer responding to credit inquiries and yet, Experian failed to remove the offending entries.
Now they are brazenly advertising a service for consumers to raise their credit score... Yes, the very same one they gatekeep.
I think Andrew raises a good point which is: how exactly do we raise awareness of these sort of dark patterns that are tantamount to fraud in many cases (he cites the “mum test” which I entirely agree with)
Is there a lobby group, or a company that focuses on targeting and shaming these things? I would be 100% up for devoting a few hours a month, or even paid employment, to bringing these sort of people down.
Your targets have hundreds of millions of dollars to thwart your group, whether legally or with counter messaging, or through lobbying. Your group, being paid by a trickle of donations, is highly dependent on maintaining high motivation in order to marshall the energy necessary to go at this day in and day out for what could be years or even decades of frustrating, unrewarded effort.
This is a fundamental problem with large scale fraud, which is that the fraudsters have the money and the established networks first, and everyone has to fight to claw it back from their grasp while also disrupting the networks that enabled the fraud to grow in the first place.
The "everyone" being those from whom the money is being taken, who are therefore that much less equipped to mount a sustained attack.
tl;dr you'll be battling the bullshit asymmetry principle, except with money
I feel like the main problem is that the practice is so pervasive and diffuse its hard to focus attention on a particular target.
The most effective course of action is to adopt a strategy of intentional unfairness: pick one offender at semi-random and focus on maximally punishing them using all legally available remedies until they change. If we could coordinate and focus all the diffuse hatred people have for these practices on one target at a time, I think it could be forceful enough to create change.
This seems like a remarkably similar pattern to Intuit trying to hide its Free File services and take every possible opportunity to funnel people into paid versions of TurboTax (I think Intuit later withdrew from the Free File program, but was one of the key companies that originally lobbied for it, presumably to stop the IRS from pursuing an in-house solution) [1].
These are credit reporting agencies, not credit rating agencies. Credit rating agencies are primarily for directly assessing a credit report for the likelihood of the debtor to either pay back, or default, on a loan.
On the other hand, the 3 credit reporting agencies (Experian, Equifax, TransUnion) work by simply gathering credit information, and using industry standard (and usually shared[0]) scoring models to assign a FICO or Vantage score to individuals, after which the lender can use any of their own classification criteria to deny credit or assign an interest rate.
The point is that it's standard. Credit rating agencies have their own formulas and risk assessment profiles, and typically assess a debtor's ability to pay back a debt in aggregate with other debtors. When companies are shuffling around and selling debt on the backend, they ask a credit rating agency to assess the debt, since a FICO/Vantage score isn't a full picture on how likely a debtor is to pay back a loan. The only difference between the 3 credit reporting agencies are how good their contracts are with lenders in terms of aggregating the most accurate and up-to-date data.
When you say "credit rating", are you talking about companies like Moody's? Or is there yet another layer of companies processing individual consumers' data behind the scenes?
I definitely meant to write "credit reporting" in my original comment, but I never considered how credit rating and credit reporting companies might interact. Glad I made that mistake because I learned something from your comments.
Yes, Moody's and the like that caused the 2008 financial crisis. It was indeed a mostly pedantic point, but even the OP there (cwkoss) said 'rating' when they meant 'reporting' since it wouldn't be hard for the government to run a data aggregation platform with a few backends dedicated to calculating FICO or Vantage scores.
(Technically the Government already backs the entire credit rating agency and their loan ratings, since they gave out billions in bailout money in the 2008 crisis :P)
Instead, you get companies that aren't penalized for fixing mistakes, even though they negatively affect you.
The companies aren't technically deciding what services you are eligible for, and neither would the government - but they do give information to people that do. And they use a secret formula to do it. I don't know why you think that the government would do this with credit reports. I mean, all they have to do is pass laws to govern banking and declare that they need to not give folks with "bad credit" loans.
Not everything government run is automatically worse. For a private company that is seemingly immune to bad PR over repeated full data breaches, security and security by design are costs. There are many private firms that should have an army of IT sec-ops, but instead have zero or close to it.
Meanwhile, government IT tends to be the bottom of the barrel. Though, many government contracted sites are just fine.
Overall, the incentives are not quite aligned for security and a company that does not have to care.
> Do you think the government is going to bring NSA level security to the table? Probably not.
The argument I was opposing is 'the government can't do anything right compared to the private sector', not 'we need an NSA apparatus to secure our credit scores'.
> And need I remind you that the NSA had millions of sensitive recirds stolen by a single IT tech?
Which private company is immune to whistleblowers?
People talk about China's social credit system as some sort of dystopian nightmare.
But we have a credit system in western democracies that is run by private for profit companies, that disproportionately punishes poor people through negatively compounding outcomes.
It's a night and day difference, because the credit system is only related to your ability to repay debts.
It is neutral to, and cannot be easily and directly cooped for Government control of personal behaviour, morality, and relationships. It is not a tool of total social control. And it is not centralised to the same entity that has a monopoly on force.
> the credit system is only related to your ability to repay debts.
Your credit _score_ is only related to a subset of your ability to pay debts.
The US credit system is related to far more things, including housing and jobs.
I, as a person who made a software engineer salary, but never had a credit card or student loans or any other debt, have been bounced by credit checks due to not having a credit score.
That means some apartments won't rent to me, buying a house or car is harder, etc.
I haven't personally had any job issues from it, but it's entirely legal in the US for a potential employer to reject job applicants or rescind offers based on credit check result.
The fact that a private company controls my ability to rent apartments due to this dumb system actually feels far worse to me than if the government controlled it. If the government did, they could at least know that I'd paid my bills on time for years, and had sufficient salary to obviously pay for that apartment.
> And it is not centralised to the same entity that has a monopoly on force.
How is that a good thing? We already have given the government a monopoly on force, so they already have unrestricted power over our lives... why does then giving another unrelated private company _more_ power seem better? Since the government already has 100% power over whether you go to jail or not, them also being able to say you're a good or bad debtor seems better since it doesn't give them any additional power, just a more fine-grained way to use their power.
> [all that other stuff]
Does china actually do any of that? None of the things you listed sound very concrete, to say the least.
What Canada did to those protesters shows why you don't want it to be government controlled.
Its a sticky problem because both options suck. Would be best if we could manage to do away with the system entirely. But good luck. The financial sector holds way to much power in our society. They usually get what they want.
> the credit system is only related to your ability to repay debts.
Is it? In Australia things like rent, electricity and phone bills all have credit checks attached. If you fail to pay bills (which I guess is a kind of debt but not one that originated with a loan) then you need to pay a large bond. If your credit score does start to slip, life becomes increasingly expensive and limits your ability to meet ongoing obligations.
> It is neutral to, and cannot be easily and directly cooped for Government control of personal behaviour, morality, and relationships.
Yes it can, for example the behaviour of poor people in rental accomodation is much more heavily policed than wealthy people who own their houses.
Poor people are stigmatised and frequently held to a higher standard because they are seen as "relying on other people's money", and the slippery slope nature of for profit credit scoring exacerbates this problem.
> It is not a tool of total social control
You've clearly never been poor, nor had any problems with your credit score.
> And it is not centralised to the same entity that has a monopoly on force.
Again, you've obviously never had a problem with your credit score. Companies that can afford to pay legal fees are definitely aligned with the same entity that has a monopoly on force.
Can you explain more exactly how the CCP's version achieves "total social control"? I have seen many examples of Chinese people acting in ways that are not congruent with the CCP's morality.
Experian stole our credit card number about 15 years ago. When I called the credit card company to issue a chargeback, the customer service rep said that over half their calls were about unauthorized charges from Experian, and that the credit card company had established a special flow to block the fraudulent charges (instead of changing the credit card number).
From what I can tell, if they were in literally any other line of business, they would be blocked by all financial institutions.
true story: the last Harley Davidson i bought after I made Journeyman was financed through H-D Financing because in the 21st century vehicle companies are just thinly veiled loan companies. During the sit-down with the moneyman he grunted a few times looking at Experian and Equifax before flipping the screen to me and asking to pull up my FICO score instead from my credit card company. it took ten seconds and i got approved for a pretty good rate. When I asked what happened he said Experian says no to anything without the last name Rockefeller, and Equifax can never find anyone before it crashes.
Experian is the only agency that doesn't allow you to lock your credit for free, only "freeze" it. The differences aren't immediately obvious, but locking can be undone (nearly) instantaneously, whereas un-freezing takes many days.
If the others can do it, Experian could do, but they treat protecting your identity as a revenue stream. Disgusting.
unfreezing is instant, I have mine frozen and unfreeze it when I need to apply for credit without any problem. they just lie to make it sound less appealing.
Freezing is always what you want, that's what they are required by law to provide. There is no law that says they can't also provide something similar and encourage people to pay for that, and that's what locking is.
I recently applied for a credit card and temporarily unfroze (thawed) my credit with all 3 bureaus a few minutes before I submitted the application and was approved.
I’ve never been able to figure out the difference and haven’t cared to dig much deeper. I use the freeze and have been able to unfreeze on the spot when needed (I.e. at the counter at a bank).
From what I could tell the lock is a dark pattern to charge for something that is free and (potentially) less effective than the freeze since, from my understanding, the freeze is regulated where the lock is not.
This is just another dark pattern. All you need is freezing, it’s instant to freeze/unfreeze and required to be free by law.
They just hide the option on the site and make it seem like you need to pay for “locking”. I end up having to use Google every time to actually find the page to unfreeze.
Imagine working on these features that exist exclusively for tricking people into spending more money. All the way from leadership, product management, development, testing, ... You must be super disconnected from what goes on at work I imagine.
There's no limit on the outrage one can feel about that, the worst being the absolute absence of accountability from these credit bureaus, and the lack of recourse against these. They carry on handling your data like it's theirs, occasionally giving your social identity to hackers without so much as a "woopsy". You can't just switch, and you need them if you ever want to do something super crazy like buying a house, a car, or background check for a job. You know for a fact that nothing will ever happen to them until society crumbles altogether. It's hard feeling so powerless.
Buying a house/car or getting a job is something that happens everyday without anyone consulting Experian. If you don't like Experian then don't do business with people that use Experian.
> If you don't like Experian then don't do business with people that use Experian.
Yeah… that’s not how that works. Generally:
1. You have no idea in advance what credit reporting agencies the lender or employer will use.
2. Even if you know, you’re now fighting two kafkaesque bureaucracies at once instead of just one. Enjoy that.
3. The consequences are life-altering.
4. For mortgages it’s often required to query all three credit reporting agencies.
5. If you make known your issue, most lenders take it as a sign you aren’t credit-worthy
6. All three agencies are huge sacks of shit. There’s no ethical reason to object to Experian but not to the others. They’re all utterly horrid in effectively every aspect.
7. It is literally impossible to opt out of your information being stored and disseminated by the credit reporting agencies, and their business is legally protected.
Many of us are software engineers of some sort. Why do we (and our colleagues) participate in this kind of dark pattern BS? Just don’t write the code. Yes maybe they will fire you but you can threaten to go public with your side of the story. Sooner or later sleazebags who push this sort of stuff will get the message.
What bugs me most is the "your email address is compromised" messages... they're meaningless... my email address is nearly two decades old, I'm sure it's on many lists. But without any indication of where/how or if there's a password associated with any breach, it's just noise.
I used to have a free account with Whitepages before 2016 or thereabouts when they offered a free tier. I doubt it was comprehensive because I only ever got a couple alerts about my email, but it did let you know which breach it was. I'm not sure how good the paid tier they now offer is.
All of the credit rating agencies suck. But that being said, Experian is the only one that actually matters. And none of the free credit monitoring services have their data. IMHO their app is a necessary evil to know where your credit truly stands, and I don't mind using it for that.
It's what practically all major lenders look at. Some of the lower tier credit card issuers will look at Transunion/Equifax, as well as landlords etc. because they're cheaper to pull. But anything serious like a mortgage or personal loan comes down to your Experian score.
I'd love to hear an answer to this question from someone in the industry. Could it somehow be added to the Open Banking standards that are becoming widely adopted, or might it be introduced in a similar manner?
I actually used Experian lately. I was a prospective tenant of an apartment and the landlord wanted a credit report. It seems that no one really cares about it being a full-hard-hit report anymore, at least for these sorts of things, but they _did_ want more than a screenshot of my FICO score from my bank app.
Experian's PDF version of my FICO score looked very official, and I got the apartment.
It's harder than I thought to get both my FICO score and my name on the same page/screenshot.
This is what maddens me the most about the TradFi space. Everything is supposedly regulated but in the end the b2c companies will keep doing whatever they want.
At least serious DeFi gives you a quantum of sovereignty! Sure many will say: “but look at all those crypto grifters!”. But if you aren’t completely consumed by greed it is child’s play to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Experian has a range of data products. In the US, employers can buy the information in your credit report, without your approval or notification, just without the final score. Another Experian product is a database of images from license plate readers, tracking your driving.
Experian should be illegal under GDPR. It operates without the user/victim's consent and the victim has zero rights over the data collected, much of which can have a drastic effect on the victim's life. I can't believe Experian exists.
Well technically you do consent to sharing your information with reporting agencies every time you interact with a lender or issuer. I realize this is a technicality as we are essentially forced to do this in order to interact with the US primary financial system.
It's probably worth pointing out the alternative to centralized, reasonably deterministic credit reporting is basically hard dings (e.g. known missed payments) & bank statements and income. This locks credit availability even more directly to your wealth and income position. Credit reports, at least, are a broader model of behavior whose inputs are well understood and relatively easy to track with free apps like Credit Karma & other competitors.
> It operates without the user/victim's consent and the victim has zero rights over the data collected
This may be trickier to demonstrate than you might think. It could be that every credit card you use has Experian as a data processor, and that the only way to disengage is to stop using the credit card.
This framework is spot on. The US desperately needs privacy legislation like the GDPR, or the surveillance industry will go right on building their de-facto government that is utterly unaccountable.
Long times ago, I tried to unsubscribe from their annoying emails and after a lot of back and forth with their CS, they asked me for my bank statement and last 3 years address. So, I just marked their emails as spam
Fine, but what could Hacker News have done to piss them off? HN doesn't typically assign gender identities to the authors of articles it links, does it?
Why are the CRAs private? Even from a libertarian perspective — you have all the inefficiencies and abuses that are created by lack of choice, but without the oversight you’d get as a government function. It’s the worst of both worlds.
My initial reaction to a nationalized CRA is that I’m not 100% sure I trust my government to decide what services I’m eligible for in society. I don’t trust it to not start merging over with the surveillance and police state.
Imagine your cell phone pinging a nearby tower during a protest and losing the ability to open a line of credit.
A few months ago I was able to bypass creating an account (and sidestepping all the dark patterns) by just calling their automated phone number and unfreezing with my PIN. Was pretty painless.
If the credit reporting companies are all such sleazy incompetent dirtbags why is it still impossible to opt-out from most credit reporting data collection?
I was thinking of disconnecting identity from transactions but I am not sure that is technically feasible without introducing anonymizing middlemen functions who know can verify and transfer the funds without releasing info about originating account holder. Pipe dream probably.
Their response was:
1. a notice that they needed more time to handle my complaint, and then on the deadline to respond 2. 650 words that can be summarized as a) "Experian Consumer Services" is not the same as Experian, the credit reporting agency b) The terms of service allow Experian Consumer Services to do what they want c) You are already unsubscribed from emails from our partners
Regardless, I'd suggest everyone else affected by this issue file a complaint as well. At the very least, these complaints are not cheap to process.