lying on your behalf - that's a new (old) one

[acroyear]

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Independence Day | PBS:

The theme of disintermediation -- of eliminating middlemen -- has been a driving force in the Internet for as long as commerce has been allowed on the web. But what happens when the middleman you just eliminated had as one of his or her jobs the task of keeping us from being ripped off?

Tasks that are harder to accomplish are also less likely to be foolishly accomplished, which is why so few of us make trips to Nigeria.

That's not the way we are supposed to view things, of course. Ideally the Internet as a research tool is supposed to give us all the information we need in order to resist any allure the Internet has as a tool of fraud or misadventure. But this attitude ignores many of the fundamental forces at work in most sales situations where the simple fact is that we want to buy, the seller wants to sell, and so any countervailing forces are purely voluntary, which is to say often nonexistent.

Take our current national economic mess, the so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis. I like to think that I'm not a subprime kind of guy, but pretending to work as I do (my kids think I TYPE for a living) the world may not always see me the way I would like to be seen. So last year, in what we didn't know were the waning and idyllic pre-subprime days, I tried to get a new mortgage. Of course I used the Internet to get the loan because, as we all know, when banks compete I win. And within a few days, without having to actually meet with or even speak to another human, I found myself offered a $336,000 mortgage.

It was SO easy. Fill out a few online forms, make some choices, and there I was, about to close that loan. But then I did an odd thing. I carefully read the papers I was about to sign (I'm one of THOSE people). And in that residential loan application, right on line something or other, was a number that didn't make any sense to me at all. It was labeled "total household income" and was almost twice the pitiful amount I actually earn.

From where did that number come? It certainly never came from me. Since my signature would be at the bottom of this application I wanted to make sure everything was correct, so I called the mortgage broker. For the first time we spoke. She was a very nice lady, too, and explained that number was the variable required for all the ratios to be correct so I could qualify for the loan.

"But it isn't true," I said.

"Do you want the loan or not?" she asked.

Not.

I wasn't so principled as cowardly, but maybe that doesn't matter: I did what I knew was the right thing for me, which was to walk away from the loan. But evidently a lot of other people took the other course and today are having trouble paying for their houses, which is a big part of the reason why we are in this current economic mess.

Comments

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Pet peeve:
But what happens when the middleman you just eliminated had as one of his or her jobs the task of keeping us from being ripped off?

This is one of the problems of bypassing the FDA and buying pharmaceuticals on the internet, often from other countries.