Astute consumers and criminal minded people have been able to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in the credit scoring systems to obtain credit. For example, previous ownership of a credit card may significantly increase an individual's ability to obtain further credit, while privacy issues may prevent a fraud from being exposed. Certain telecommunication companies and their relationship with credit reporting bureaus have enabled fabricated credit files to be created by the exploit of privacy blocks, which deny any third party entity to actual information held by the government. While the credit reporting system is designed to protect both lenders and borrowers, there are loopholes which can allow opportunistic individuals to abuse the system. A few of the motivations and techniques for credit abuse include churning, rapidfire credit applications, repetitive credit checks, selective credit freezes, applications for small business rather than personal credit, piggybacking and hacking, as it happened with Equifax in April and September 2017.
