I Am Being Told That The Credit Scores I Bought From An Online Credit Report Service Are Not My Real Scores, Is This True?

Believe it or not, but those expensive online credit report services are not giving you your real credit scores.  In Fact, they even have a special name for the fake credit scores they provide, educational scores. 

I learned this about three years ago in my mortgage business when on occasion clients would bring in their own credit report to compare it against the one I had.  This usually happened when my credit scores were lower than the scores that the client had obtained on their own.  We have found that the scores being sold from the online services are almost always higher than the real score.  Also, you can not get your real score even if you buy your credit report from the credit bureau directly.  I had a client recently challenge me and waive his official Equifax purchased report in my face.  Even though he had purchased it directly from Equifax, he still had a consumer version of his credit which did not include real credit scores.

I personally think this is another huge flaw in the system.  What good does it do to give people access to their credit reports, but not their real scores.  After all, everything is based on scoring now anyway.  At this time, the only way to know your real scores is to get them from someone who has direct access to the credit bureaus on a commercial basis (e.g. mortgage brokers, car dealers, banks, etc…).

In defense of the educational scores, some have suggested that they be used as a rough guide of where your credit score is.  The problem with that is I have seen as much as a 50 point difference between the real scores and the so-called educational scores, so I don’t really know how much they can even be relied on even as a general point of reference.

Agree or disagree, click on comments below.

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James L. Paris

Comments

[carol]

On reading your article,I totally agree. I recently requested my credit report and score using annualcreditreport.com. then applied for a mortgage loan through a bank and was denied, the scores did not agree. I also requested my credit score from myfico.com and receive another set of scores, how do you actually find out what your credit score actually is. The bank would not tell me what score
they received.

Thanks for your help