Incident 405: Schufa Credit Scoring in Germany Reported for Unreliable and Imbalanced Scores

Description: Creditworthiness Schufa scores in Germany reportedly privileged older and female consumers, and people who changed addresses less frequently, and were unreliable depending on scoring version.

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Incident Stats

Incident ID
405
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2018-11-28
Editors
Khoa Lam
Schufa: This is how Germany's most influential credit agency works
spiegel.de · 2018

It was supposed to be a road trip, two weeks in a rental car through the USA. But when Sven Drewert wants to increase his credit card limit for the holidays, he gets a surprise. The bank declined the increase. The reason: His rating at the …

What a report from Germany teaches us about investigating algorithms
cjr.org · 2019

Reporting about large-scale finance decisions is difficult for any journalist—but a team of German investigative reporters has crowdsourced a major investigative story revealing flaws in a closely guarded credit scoring algorithm.

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Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.