This week on ‘Last Week Tonight’: John Oliver trolls credit reporting agencies and Neil Patrick Harris

The main segment of last night's Last Week Tonight was dedicated to credit reports, their unreliability, and the devastating effects an erroneous report can have.

John Oliver noted that employers are increasingly looking at potential employees' credit reports, so it's extra important that yours is correct. This is a big problem for people named Judy Thomas, at least two of whom have spent many years trying to clear up mistakes on their credit reports.

Or Amit Patel, who needed a credit check when applying for an apartment and was denied because it labeled him as a “terrorist,” somehow.

Or Helen McGill, whose credit report said she was dead.

Or Samuel Jackson (not the actor, though he might want to pay attention to this story), whose background check said he was three different sex offenders, one of whom was convicted when this Jackson was three years old.

“There's only one person who could pull off being three sex offenders at the same time, and that is Mr. Neil Patrick Harris,” Oliver explained. So Harris might want to go ahead and make sure his criminal background check is in order, too, because his SEO just took a big hit. 

In the end, Last Week Tonight decided that years upon years of credit reporting agency errors needed to be punished, and so set up a bunch of websites with URLs very similar to the big three credit bureaus that promoted very terrible services. 

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