Complaint Review: StageStream LLC - San Diego California

Let's look at your statements...

Ally Bank leveraged StageStream to cost me thousands extra on my recent auto loan.

and

I was victimized by a car dealer that claimed my bank who (who knows me well) was behind the loan, when instead a false and unverified credit report was generated by StageStream and utilized by Ally Bank to justify raising the interest rate fro 8.76% clear up to 10.96% in a few days in which no financial activity was undertaken by me.

Let's look at reality...

First you haven't proven the information they used was false as it appears you haven't followed my advice yet as to how to contact them to get a copy of their report. 

Then we can see what a load of BS your claims of needing to file Bankruptcy due to the increase in the interest rate is based on the numbers you posted. You are talking about a 2.2% increase in your Interest Rate. Depending on the length of the loan and amount, you are likely talking about a $10-$30/month increase in your payment. If a $30/month payment is the difference between declaring Banrkuptcy or not...you bought a car you could NOT afford. If you say the difference is higher, then again that means you are financing more than you could actually afford.

Now, if this increase ONLY caused your payments to be longer, again that is not a valid reason for BK as you would still be able to afford the payments now, and would have to show them that you know in 4-5 years you know you can't afford it and need to declare BK now...NO Trustee would approve a Bankruptcy based on that claim.  However, again with the difference in intrerest rate, the additional payments would only be another 3-5 months..not an entire year.

Perhaps you can post the details of the two loans you are claiming. That is the Amount Financed, Length of the loan and the payment amount.

By the way thought you may have figured it out by now or that you just did a typo, but the company you wrote this report on is SAGEstream, not STAGEstream.

 Delusions made by StageStream Defender thus far: StageStream Model is not defined. Smoke and mirrors. StageStream Model has not been shown to be justified, i.e., benign, non-malignant. Stage Stream is presumed to have accurately and rigorously ensured that they have identified a moving target to be me, and not someone else, i.e., a criminal masking themselves as me.

This is a whitewash of StageStream. Recently I've not used credit, therefore it is axiomatic that no recent history of credit usage can be cited or reported on. Absence of credit activity should be a huge plus. The premise that not needing to use credit, therefore not having used credit is "bad" or negative is draconian.

People like myself who live within their means are an asset to the economy of the the American people. If we are see as thorns in the side of the banking community, which is utterly dependent on people living far enough outside their means that borrowing is required. The car dealership chose the bank - not me.

The First bank the car dealership was GM Financial. The second and final bank the dealership chose was Ally Bank. I was deceived into thinking that my bank, Bank7 was used. I later consulted with Bank7 which informed me that they Had Not Been approached At All.

I was not afforded the right to decline the bank used. I was not afforded the right to decline a potential bank due to its use of maverick credit reporting entity. The car dealership lied to me claiming 3 times that my bank (which is definitely not Ally Bank) had approved the loan - creating a false sense of security during a time in which I was still suffering from confusion from recent Cardiac Arrest.

I was victimized by a car dealer that claimed my bank who (who knows me well) was behind the loan, when instead a false and unverified credit report was generated by StageStream and utilized by Ally Bank to justify raising the interest rate fro 8.76% clear up to 10.96% in a few days in which no financial activity was undertaken by me.

That rate plus an expansion of the repayment by one year, cost thousands more. The extensive increase is memorialized in the printed agreement. My bank informed me that an 89 year old widow had also been victimized by the same car dealership 4 days previously using the same high pressure scream to lure her in, and the same high pressure to obtain signature on a loan she did not understand.

She too is now faced with filing bankruptcy as I now am. This is what the defender of StageStream is actually defending. The gibberish about unknown adversarial models, and the difference in the range of two scales is a moot point in all of this.

Thank you for continuing the tradition of when someone posts something they don't like, they try and make their situation sound even worse every time they post. I am still always surprised how many people go out and make major purchases after just getting out of the hospital and being on several drugs that  affect their ability to make decisions.

I do have to congratulate you on one thing, I think your post is the first post to try and blame your credit score on the Federal Reserve and their reliance on Illegal immigration.

I have a right to determine the sources of inputs StageStream used to INSURE that they have accurately identified me as the person to whom they are attaching negative reports. This issue was not addressed in your opinion piece.

- Actually it was addressed. I told you that if you want to see your information, then you can't call them.  You need to follow the instructions to fax a request or through the Internet...just like ANY other Credit Reporting Agency.

You seem satisfied that you have furnished a bank a tool to extract thousands of extra dollars from me

- NOPE..When you were presented with the loan and Interest, it was your choice to approve or decline the loan. If you say the dealer failed to disclose things then that is an issue between you and the dealer. However, your issue with being "confused' because you were on medication has zero bearing on this. If you were that bad off then you may have a case against the hospital for releasing you before you were ready and without the needed supervision due to your condition. If you ever do declare bankruptcy and use what you posted here as the reason, you will be lucky if the Trustee doesn't toss your case out. Because if you are one car loan away from Bankruptcy, you have much more severe issues than a loan you are paying a few additional percentage points on.

I will add one additonal item.  If you were really "confused" during the sale.  How can you guarantee  what you are telling us that the dealer told you is 100% correct?  Wouldn't you have to be confused about the entire transaction, or do you just have "selective confusion", on things that only help your claims?  

While you, a professional web monitor paid to verbally created Plausible Deniability, find my situation comical, I find your comments to be patently unprofessional.

- I really wish that was true, as if I was getting paid just from the number of times I have been accused of this I could actually retire and move to my own private island. Yet, I am still a working stiff who doesn't get paid a single cent for any post. Who by the way does not work for any bank or Credit Reporting Agency.

All credit scores utilize different models to come up with what they call a credit score (not opinion - a fact).  To add to the confusion, the range on each model can also vary.  A credit score from SageStream cannot be compared against the credit score from Trans Union, just as you cannot compare against FICO, Experian, etc... 

In other words, had your bank used your Trans Union score, you would have fared no better than using FICO, or Sage Stream, or any other credit score modeling company.  Again, that's not an opinion - that's a fact.

What you should do is evaluate whether each generated your credit score from the same source.  In other words, did they use your ACCURATE credit history to generate your score?  I emphasize accurate because there are times when one credit monitoring company will show a mistake and give you either a lower or higher credit score than you would otherwise be entitled to. 

One complaint people make with regards to SageStream is that they seem to pull a different credit history than the person wanting the score has.  So I would check that as soon as you can.  And no, you cannot call to request a SageStream credit history.  If Ally uses SageStream, then you should ask your bank for a copy of the credit history used to generate the score you received.  If they don't, then you chose the wrong bank to obtain a loan.

So why would banks like Ally and others utilize SageStream vs. the other more well-known companies like FICO, TransUnion, or Experian, or others?  The answer is simple:  SageStream's score model tends to stress an emphasis on people who screw up their credit more recently than other agencies will.  If a person screwed up something about 1-2 years ago on their credit, but righted the ship, and done very well since, then their score will reflect that. 

However, if someone had been perfect up until about 3-6 months ago, and then screwed up, then SageStream will lower your credit score much more harshly than the other agencies will.  Banks believe your most recent history is far more relevant than your overall history.  Credit repair companies have become quite popular over the years and utilized by people to help raise their credit scores in order to qualify for a mortgage, a low-interest car loan, etc.... 

These repair companies help mask or even eliminate older credit issues that can lower a score and keep it low.  Once repaired, a person can generally qualify for any loan they wish.  However, a credit repair company really can't help a SageStream score because repairing more recent credit history is nearly impossible and is easily verifiable.

The problem with your complaint is that it is impossible to claim SageStream cost you thousands on a recent auto loan because you have no idea whether the SageStream score of 467 is an equivalent to a TransUnion score of 696.  To give you an idea of what I mean, the lowest TransUnion score you can get is 300.  The highest you can get is 850.  The lowest SageStream score you can get is ZERO.  The highest is 999.  The range of scores one can achieve is far greater, which is why the comparability is impossible.

Your rebuttal indicating a similar situation happened to another person, does not mean the same thing happened to you; it only means that your situation were similar but not equivalent.  Each credit situation is evaluated on its own merits.  Finally, age and condition does not have relevance to your complaint or your case.  Now if they charged you higher interest because you were old or infirmed, that's illegal.  But if it was simply based on your credit score, then no.

Note:  I do not work for a bank, or any credit reporting agency.

 The purpose of my phone inquiry to StageStream will be to determine the whether they even know who I am. If StageStream is as defensive as you are, then I will have to make that determination through a federal agency. Equifax was hacked and my information was part of that leak.

Knowing that illegal immigration is big business for the Federal Reserve and its downstream supplicants I strongly suspect I am a victim of identity theft. While you, a professional web monitor paid to verbally created Plausible Deniability, find my situation comical, I find your comments to be patently unprofessional.

Your retort is a variant Gotcha from the banking system. It is your opinion, and one I reject. I have a right to determine the sources of inputs StageStream used to INSURE that they have accurately identified me as the person to whom they are attaching negative reports. This issue was not addressed in your opinion piece.

You seem satisfied that you have furnished a bank a tool to extract thousands of extra dollars from me. At this point that appears to be the sole function of your scarcely known start-up. I received no phone call promised by StageStream's automatic announcement system. I am almost certain that identity theft is involved here, and thus the StageStream number is fallacious.

The car dealership told me that the loan I was obtaining was from my personal bank in town. When I later went to my bank, to inquire where my coupon book was, they informed me that the dealership had lied to me. My bank received no phone call from the dealership.

On return to the dealership to tell them I wanted to rescind the deal, they said they had instead used GM Financial because it had a lower interest rate. Dealership did not inquire to find the interest rate in order to make other than a false statement to me. At the time I was lured into the dealership I was days out from cardiac arrest, and still confused.

General confusion resulting from Atrial Fibrillation and the experimental medicine I was and am taking for that episode. I have nothing to laugh about, and neither do you. When I went to my personal bank to inform them of what was going on with this high interest loan, they informed me that four days previously another one of their customers, an 89 year old widow had be scammed in the same manner.

This makes two of us that will have to file for bankruptcy in the last years of our life. I can not pay this loan. But the dealership got to remove a vehicle from its responsibility, and two elders now get crushed.

Your credit score is a number that you need to really understand.  Don't say you understand your credit score because if you did  you wouldn't be mentioning your TU score as the one you are using for comparison.  

You have no less than a few dozen different scores depending on which model and which credit report is used.  Now, there are only a few "major" scores, the biggest being FICO and then Vantage.  But even with those there are several different models.  Most use different scales and the numbers are rarely 1:1.    Which is why this is really hillarious when you are trying to compare your TU score with this SageStream score.

Ally Bank leveraged StageStream to cost me thousands extra on my recent auto loan.

- No. They used SageStream and you were presented with an Interest Rate based on the score that they received. You could either accept or decline the loan.  You decided to accept it, instead of looking at other banks to see if you could get a better interest rate by companies that don't use them.  Once you accepted the loan, you can't come back later and complain and it just becomes a case of buyer's remorse.

By the way a 696 TU score is not great, based on their scale you still fall into the "fair/good" category, which would still never give you the best possible rates.

I called to request my credit report from StageStream and have not heard from them.

- No Credit Reporting Agency allows you to call to get your report. It took about 30 seconds to go to their site and find out how to request your score online or by fax.