Tired of Bad Credit - That All Ends Today
The credit score industry is a huge one. People need to see their credit score to make all kinds of financial decisions; since it only costs about $12 ooon average each time, people usually do pony up the cash. It can add up to a pretty substantial figure for those who sell these scores. Still, if you are like most people, you do resent getting hit each time you go to get your credit score; it can add up to something for the private individual too. Now, if a new lawsuit is anything to go by, it would appear that for the kind of money they charge you just to show you a number, they may not even be dealing fair with you.
The thing is, charging you $10 and $15 each time you apply to get your credit score is such a profitable thing for these agencies that there have been lots of them getting into the business. There used to be just four or five 10 years ago; now, there are twenty of them.
So okay, there are all these people trying to profit from your business; that's just a good old-fashioned capitalism, isn't it? The problem though is that they don't sell what you think you're getting. Credit scores can be calculated in any number of ways ? by any number of formulas.
When you think of a credit score, you only think of the FICO score ? the most widely accepted and recognized formula. When these credit score websites tell you they're offering you your credit score, they just try to take advantage of how you go and assume that it's the FICO score. They don't tell you that they use their own formula to put your credit history, your credit applications and God knows what else to arrive at their own figure. Now it would be completely legal what they did if they told you that you were getting a worthless number (or at least that it was not a number that the lenders and banks used). Anyone has a right to make a bad deal. The problem is just that these companies mislead people or at least take advantage of their innocence by crafty advertising.
In the case of one company, the credit report major Experian, a subsidiary called ConsumerInfo.com has had a class-action lawsuit filed against it for actually advertising an in-house credit report as the kind that most lenders use. The reason they got caught is that they went and put in the fine print that their credit score was not sold to any lender and was not used by any lender. Someone thought to read the fine print and caught them out.
Get a non-FICO credit score, and you don't just get a number that's derived out of different formula than theFICO; you get a number on a scale that's completely different. VantageScore, which is what Experian sells, is a range from between 501 and 990. FICO scores you on a scale of 300 to 850. A score of 750 on the FICO would be quite good; a score of 750 on the VantageScore scale would be quite abysmal.
We can probably expect many more consumer lawsuits that try to fight back.
