owen

I got more spam from QuickenLoans today. This is surprising considering the last message I sent to them regarding their emailing practices.

I have received a slew of unwanted and irrelevant emails from QuickenLoans since we got our mortgage through them. Worse yet, they periodically call me at work, wondering if I would like to refinance. Note that QuickenLoans isn’t actually the finance company on my mortgage, they were just the broker at the time we signed — we have had no reason to deal with them since our mortgage was completed.

I know how you guys love to read these things, so I’ll re-post my reply email here. Maybe someone at Quicken will take notice and get me off of their mailing list. Yeah, who am I kidding?

Your QuickenLoans MortgageExpert wrote:

A lot of my clients have been asking me how they can protect their personal information when they are shopping online.

We are working on a new Internet Privacy Guide to help our clients understand identity theft and other privacy concerns. Please let me know if you would like a copy when it becomes available â€" I’d be more than happy to send you one.

In the meantime, I thought you’d find this important tip very helpful. Please feel free to pass it along to your friends and family.

Question: How do I stop getting credit card junk mail?

Personally, I would like the answer to the following question:

How can I get QuickenLoans and its agents to stop sending me junk email, junk mail, and junk phone calls?

I didn’t realize that when I got a loan via QuickenLoans that I would be indentured to some “loyalty headquarters” to receive endless quantities of emails and phone calls with “we have a new low rate” and “please look at our new offerings” and “how’s that loan from five years ago going?” and “here’s how you can avoid being contacted by people who aren’t contacting you”.

If you were really concerned about privacy issues, the first paragraph of your new guide would help clients understand how your own company abuses their contact information, and how in spite of every request for removal, they will be contacted by anyone that happens to peruse an agent’s client list.

I got what I wanted from QuickenLoans and now I have no further need of its services. Until I started being routinely harassed by mail, email, and phone, it was a pleasant experience for me. Now, I wouldn’t recommend the company to anyone, simply because if you’re using my contact information to forward junk to me, then I’m left to wonder what you’re using my other sensitive information for, and I’m not going to tell friends that I trust you enough to use your service.

Opted-in should not be a default contact setting. Even if I did say it was ok to send related information, your stretch of the word “related” to mean more than “related to my original loan” is inappropriate.

Sure, I could fill out your form to be removed form your mailing lists, but I won’t be submitting my email address, phone number, and home address into a web form - Why would I give my contact information to potentially more people who would send me junk? What kind of half-assed “loyalty” system will insert my first name into the email, but won’t add a simple code to the unsubscribe web address so that I can be sure that I’m disabling the correct account and that I’m not handing my contact information to a whole new batch of spammers?

Until this point, I’ve been somewhat indifferent, considering the volume of spam email I get every day. But this email takes the cake. Sending me spam to tell me how I can prevent spam from other people? Crazy! Why would you care, unless maybe you accidentally sent those people (the credit card companies) my contact information?

This isn’t really an email to tell you to take me off your mailing list - no, I will have already done things to prevent my ever receiving email from you again - but to outright complain about the torrent of crap that I’ve received since we finished our principal dealings with QuickenLoans in the hope that your practice changes for your other customers.