I authorized my partner to use my card in order to improve her credit score so that we can have a better mortgage later when we are ready to buy a home, but the information on the card usage does not even show on her credit report.

by Elena Romanova on February 25, 2009


It is a recent change: the authorized user information is not taken into account by the three credit score bureaus any more, so no authorized user can build any score this way. Fair Isaac Corporation’s newest FICO scoring model ignores authorized user accounts when calculating Classic FICO credit risk scores. As it is stated on the Company’s website, this action is intended to protect lenders and FICO scores from abuse of authorized user credit card accounts by a new kind of credit repair service that sells consumer credit card histories to credit applicants in order to purposefully misrepresent the applicants’ own credit history to lenders and other businesses.

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