''YOUR credit history is history,'' says the bloke on telly in the Radio Rentals ads, and I just had to find out why anyone would seek out customers with a proven inability to pay bills.
What's more, I assumed this trawling of the nation's worst customers represented bottom-fishing of the lowest kind.
Not so.
Actually, John Hughes, the man behind the highly successful ''no credit history checks'' campaign at Radio Rentals - which is the main business of stockmarket-listed company Thorn - offers two surprises.
First, Hughes is seeking business at this end of the market because he says one in three people listed as credit defaulters is on the list due exclusively to unpaid phone bills. In most respects they have a good record.
Second, far from grubbing a third-rate business from second-rate customers, the Thorn group happens to have some of the strongest numbers in the market.
Little wonder, then, that Hughes too is anything but predictable. The one-time food industry executive (his last job was as chief executive at Domino's Pizza) is outspoken and forthright.
''The situation with mobile phones is shocking,'' he says. ''You're getting kids with $50 plans - they get an upmarket phone and download a range of stuff, next thing they're hit with a very big bill, they ignore it and before they know what's happened they have a 'credit history' that's a black mark against them for years.''
He has a point. The big phone companies have quietly become key providers of credit to the poorest and most immature market sectors. It only takes a bill of $100 to be unpaid for more than 62 days and people get a credit history that will be on the books of every bank and finance company in Australia for at least five years.
And though we have long known that bad credit hits the poorest and the youngest, until Hughes came along it was never recognised that the system was so obviously unfair.
Armed with an array of statistics - a survey from credit researcher Veda Advantage that shows 18-25 year olds are twice as likely to apply for credit as other age groups, a Melbourne University study that shows the biggest credit issue among indigenous Australians is mobile phone bills - he suggests: ''The telephone companies are unregulated credit providers; people deserve better.''
''Just because someone did not pay a phone bill doesn't mean they should be stopped years later from getting a loan,'' Hughes says.
Some might not take Hughes seriously, until they see Thorn's recent record. Despite a whopping 60 per cent of its customers having some form of ''credit impairment'', the stock goes from strength to strength, with an 85 per cent return to shareholders in the past year.
Of course, when you examine it more closely, the Radio Rentals ''no credit checks'' campaign is not exactly ignoring credit issues. The company, which rents out everything from flat screen televisions to gym equipment, follows a rigid scorecard process that checks all aspects of a customer's ability to pay in the future, all that matters to Hughes.
You might not like this story. You might feel uneasy about finance companies that operate at this level, where the poorest and least informed are cannon fodder. But one thing is clear: phone companies put thousands of customers on to credit checklists every day and the market has come up with an answer for a rotten process. It's just a surprise the providers of that answer are themselves so successful.
