Complaint Review: Experian

I'm writing this to help people who are not familiar with the credit reporting industry and find themselves needing to monitor or dispute their credit score.   Like most people, I had heard of Experian and knew they were one of the three people from whom lenders get reports when deciding whether to give you a loan  or credit card and on what terms so when I decided I needed to dispute my score I chose the personal credit score option on their website and signed up for their credit monitoring to track my progress figruing I was tracking the same thing the lenders would be looking at.

The first thing I learned was that the scores they show you are NOT the scores that lenders will look at.  Even though the lenders will look at your Experian data, it will be the FICO score they are intersted in, not the Experian Plus score  that you get either with your free credit report from Experian.com or the one you'll get when you pay them.  Both of them will naturally be built on the same data but will weigh things differently.

To start off I compared the one I got from a lender with the one from the Experian website and they were off by about 20 points with the website score being lower.  So I naively thought that the scores, while different would at least track each other so that over time, that is, if I saw my Experian Plus score go up, I could expect the FICO score was going up as well and would be at least in the same neighborhood.

 NOT TRUE!.   In fact, at one point, after disputing some items on my credit report the Experian Plus score went up by over 100 points.   I quickly paid for thye real FICO scores from myfico.com and discovered they had not changed at all.  That 100 points can make the difference between getting a very good rate on a loan and not even qualifiing.   It's like getting results of a blood test from one lab that says your heart is fine and getting one from another that says you're dying from congestive heart failure.   This is not simply a slight inaccuracy but rather one of them is obviously completely misleading.

In summary, it is not the fact that there can be differences between the Experian plus score you get from their website and the actual Experian based FICO score that is the ripoff.  It's the fact that these two numbers can be so wildly different as to make the Experian plus score virtuallly unrelated to the score your lender is actually going to use.  In other words, the Experian plus score is useless for purposes of determining what credit or loans you can get and what other reason would there be for paying them for your score if you can't even count on a change in their score being reflected in the actual FICO score, not even the direction of the change!

What is especially egregious is that they don't give you any warning on their site that this score and monitoring service you pay for may not have any bearing on your eligibility for loans or credit due to the discrepancy between their scoring mechanism and the one used by virutally all lenders: the FICO score (or if they do it must have been buried in some fine print).

Buyer beware.   In summary, if you are going to track your scores by paying for them from someone online.  Do not use sites like Experian.com.   Rather use one like myfico.com.   While even this will not be completely accurate because there are variants on the FICO score depending on the type of loan (e.g. house vs. car) they are not likely to be wildly off like the Experian plus score so much as to make it useless in determining your elibiliity for a loan.