I am trying to refi. So I thought the $15.95/month deal from trucredit.com (aka transunion) would be great, it allows me nearly unlimited access to my credit reports from all three agencies and my scores from all three agencies.
But the scores are not real FICO scores. They are some normalized estimate based on an unknown secret recipe of trucredit. FICO scores are also secret recipes but each of the 3 reporting agencies has a repeatable way of calculating its FICO product, for instance Equifax can provide a BEACON 5 FICO score, Experian can provide a Fair Isaac V2, and TransUnion can provide a FICO Classic 2004.
Which of these scores do you get when you order your 'credit score' from trucredit.com? None of them. So the scores that you bought from TransUnion (trucredit) do not even reflect the same scores that TransUnion will report to possible lenders.
To illustrate my experience, on the exact same day, a lender queried TransUnion for my 3 scores, and there was a 28 point difference between the lowest score that trucredit reported to me and the lowest score that TransUnion reported to the querying lender. Additionally, none of the three scores matched. 28 points is a huge difference in the credit score market.
They do have a disclaimer: 'the credit score provided here is not a so-called FICO score. The credit scores of TransUnion may not be identical in every respect to any consumer credit scores produced by any other company.' But then what is 'the credit score' that they provide? It is a guess and not too accurate at that, and even the TransUnion score was not identical to the TransUnion score reported to the possible lender (on the same exact day). So trucredit is misleading and possibly downright lying to their customers with these numbers.
Jeff
Chicago, Illinois
U.S.A.