give me some credit

I subscribe to one of those credit report monitoring services. A number of years ago I had "less than perfect" credit and I wanted to work on improving my FICO score. Since then I have made a lot of improvement, yada, yada, yada, but I still subscribe to the service to keep an eye out for identity theft. I don't want to be buying a car or a house and find out that my social security number was used without my knowledge. I have been lucky so far. The only problem I had was that somehow one of my credit card numbers was leaked and someone used it to buy some stuff in California. The credit card company called me that night and asked me about the charges. Since they weren't mine the company took care of everything. But not everyone is so lucky. I have read stories about people's finances being ruined by identity theft. So, the small cost of the monthly monitoring service is well worth it.

Today I received the following email from my credit monitoring service:

Dear Valued Customer,You may have received a recent Score Watch alert noting a large drop to your FICO® score due to a balance increase on your Sallie Mae account. Please note that this is a known reporting error made by the student loan issuer, Sallie Mae and they have resolved the problem.

OK, that's fine. I didn't notice any changes, so I am not worried. But what does scare me is that someone as big as Sallie Mae (whom we all owe student loans to!) can fuck up like this. It's scary. What if it was a small number of people who were affected. What then? Would those people have to fight with Sallie Mae to get the issue resolved? Probably.

Sigh. We should all just use cash.