When shopping online for loans or credit cards, be aware of what browser you're using!

[thewayne]

"Someone wrote in to The Consumerist to report an interesting discovery: while shopping online for a car loan, Capital One offered him different rates, depending on the browser he used! Firefox yielded the highest rate at 3.5%, Opera took second place with 3.1%, Safari was only 2.7%, and finally, Google's Chrome browser afforded him the best rate of all: 2.3%!"

http://consumerist.com/2010/11/capital-one-made-me-different-loan-offers-depending-on-which-browser-i-used.html

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/04/132257/Do-Firefox-Users-Pay-More-For-Car-Loans

I can't say that I shop for interest rates on line, but definitely something to be aware of. There's LOTS of different browsers out there, I have five loaded on my Mac for web site testing.

Comments

[silveradept]

Hrm. How interesting that browsers would change the interest rate. So, what I really want to know is - what's the real interest rate that they're going to charge someone for their car loan?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The articles talk about risk management modeling, but that doesn't make sense to me that your browser preference could indicate adverse financial risk factors. Maybe it's actually modeling gullibility factors. ;-)

[silveradept]

Or it's something like they're going to pick numbers out of a hat to entice you to call them and get a loan set up with them, thinking you can achieve the posted rate, when you mysteriously always get a higher rate. Might be that different browsers produce different results from the RNG.