Score or report? You're entitled to a copy of your credit report annually from each credit bureau, but not the score.

I believe lenders typically use a score computed by s third party - often the "FICO Score," from Fair Isaac.

It is common for them to refuse to give you the legally required annual credit report because the data they use to verify your identity is wrong.

Presumably, if you had your record from the dump, you could type in the wrong answers they are looking for and get your free equifax report.

Usually, only one or two of the big three have a poison record that blocks access, so I guess this would only reliably unlock equifax reports.

Same here.. I applied for a loan and they found that Equifax doesn't even have my report (although the other two do). After countless phone calls they agreed to start the investigation and then the hack happened. The whole concept of private credit bureaus (that to multiple ones whose data dont match up) is fucked up. I think the federal govt should step in an put a stop to this.

The federal government is the reason it is this way-- the FCRA "Fair credit reporting act" is what give this bureaus virtual immunity from liability for propagating false information and the like. This is a great example of where regulation is anti-consumer because the regulations that pretend to protect consumers provide very little protection for consumers and a great deal of protection for the CRAs.

If its only the score you want, cant you get that from creditkarma for free?

Yes. They also have your credit history.

And, critically, a decent modern website/app and good enough customer support.

You can get a "FAKO" score from CreditKarma.

FYI, "FAKO" is VantageScore 3.0. It's colloquially called FAKO because 90% of lenders use some variation of FICO instead.

Regardless if it's FAKO or FICO score that you are looking at, they are calculated on the same credit history in your credit report (as far as I know). So, even if the scores are calculated in different ways it's reasonable to expect a high VantageScore 3.0 score will also show as a high FICO score too, even if the numbers aren't exact.

Does anyone know the specific differences in how these two scores are calculated?

FICO is an acronym for Fair, Isaac, and Company. Their "FICO Score" is a piece of software that they make and sell. I'm sure the details are a little more complicated than I'm making it sound, but it's essentially software which is sold. Just like any software, there are different versions - and it's possible to get stuck on an old version if you don't pay for updates. There's FICO 98 (from 1998), FICO 04 (2004), FICO 8 (2008) and FICO 9 (2014). [1][2].

The FICO Software is a scoring engine which will produce an output based on the input you provide it. The three big credit bureaus collect data about you and feed it into the FICO Score software. Even if they all have the same version of the FICO software, because each bureau might have slightly different data on you, your score may be different from each one. Presumably, the FAKO companies also have the FICO Score software, but a much more limited set of data to feed into it - thus making the score less reliable to someone looking to issue you a loan (Big Bank).

At least, that is my understanding of how it works - admittedly, I may be mistaken and welcome corrections.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_Sta... [2] http://www.fico.com/en/02-02-2015-fico-makes-additional-fico...

I believe the FICO algorithm is not public, so there would be no way for us to know exactly how they calculate our scores.

We only know the factors that go in to the algorithm, and the score that comes out. Basically, a black box.

I've read in another thread here on HN that we also don't know the factors that go in. Someone listed off things like company title, marital status, # kids, car make/model kind of stuff. No idea if they were full of BS, but there's no requirement that the score is based solely on items in your credit report. We can probably (hopefully?) be sure that no race or race-correlated factors are included. (And same for other protected classes.)

I remember at uni teacher asking why people with larger shoes are more likely to default?

Answer was: Men tend to have larger feet.

I guess even if you ignore race, sex and other factors, data will seep in eventually anyways.

You can also get it for free from (at least) American Express and Discover if you have a credit card from them. I'm sure there are other card issuers that give it to you for free as well.

And Mint (owned by quicken) so you don't even need to open a new account or ding your credit. They do, however, serve you ads based on your data -- mostly credit card offers.

Citibank card holder here - getting free FICO via my online account.

Correct. Chase offers it as well.

Does creditkarma sell your credit information to people when you sign up with them?

How else would they make enough money to exist?

Bank of America now offers it for free too...

CreditKarma does it for free, if you're in the US (no idea about outside the US). So does mint.com. So do many other credit card companies. I now have 6 or 7 credit scores, all curiously different (though within certain range of each other).

Because there are lots of different scoring algorithms. There are several different ones from FICO themselves (so there is no single one FICO score), and they have several competitors that have different algorithms. Even when using the same algorithm, you will have a different score for each credit report.

True but my experience they are all within the same range. If you get "good" score on one of them, you'd get the same on others. They may emphasize slightly different things but there's not that much difference. Also, nobody really checks that score with a point accuracy - there are ranges, but I'd be very surprised if the difference within range, say 750 to 765, means too much.

Yeah, they are usually are similar. The thing is, for many underwriters, if you ate even 1 point below their range on even one report, you will be rejected. Usually there are things most consumers can do to boost their score by a few points, though, reasonably quickly.

0.2 BTC is currently >600 USD. There's cheaper way to get a credit score.

Well yeah, but you can get your credit score and that of thousands of other people!

> Cool, this is good news as it means I might actually be able to find out my credit score.

Hahaha

the brighter side is the side of genius