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TRANSUNION BIOGRAPHY

In 1968, the Union Tank Car Company, a railcar leasing operation, created TransUnion as its parent holding company. In 1969, they acquired the Credit Bureau of Cook County (CBCC), which manually maintained 3.6 million redit files in 400 seven-drawer cabinets.

Soon after the acquisition of CBCC, TransUnion became the first company in the credit reporting industry to replace accounts receivable data with automated tape-to-disc transfer, drastically cutting the time and cost to update consumer files.

TransUnion was the first credit bureau to use online information storage and a retrieval data processing system. This system provided credit grantors across the country with one source for fast and valuable consumer credit information. Your information.

Over the next 40 years TransUnion grew to become one of the world’s leading business intelligence providers, maintaining one of the largest collections of consumer information.

TransUnion entered the direct-to-consumer market with the acquisition of TrueCredit.com in 2002 selling credit monitoring services and credit scores.

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TRANSUNION VIOLATIONS

In 2000, the Federal Trade Commission ordered the Trans Union Corporation to stop selling consumer reports in the form of target marketing lists to marketers who lack an authorized purpose for receiving them under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”). In a unanimous opinion authored by Commissioner Mozelle W. Thompson, the FTC determined that “Trans Union’s target marketing lists are . . . consumer reports under the FCRA” and concluded that Trans Union is violating the FCRA by selling this information to target marketers who lack one of the “permissible purposes” enumerated under the Act. The Commission’s decision applies to a number of Trans Union’s target marketing list products including its Master File / Selects products, its modeled products and its TransLink / reverse append products.