Can someone explain this 53 point score increase??

[Anonymous]

Okay, so equifax is terribly damaged and I am on the road to getting it back up there again. Here's the story:

I called Capital One and asked for a 30-day late removal and 60-day late removal. The lady kindly granted it and said it'd update within a few weeks. I went ahead and disputed it to make sure (you never know ). I get a credit alert showing a change and saw Capital One...excited that it was the late payments off. NOPE. Lates are still on there, but my score jumped 53 points. The only thing I can tell that's different in how it's reported is it looks like they left "Balance" blank. This is really confusing because EVEN if I did paid capital one off to a $0 balance, I still have two other credit cards with $600 and $750 limits close to being maxed. Capital One's CL for me is only 500, so I'm kind of at a loss here. Anyone care to throw in their two cents?

Thanks,

Brandon

[michjd75]

It may be because they now have your account as 'in dispute.'  When an account is in dispute, the CRA's do not count it in your FICO calculation. On the down side, if they don't change the lates and remove the dispute after investigating - there is a chance that you will lose the points you just gained. 

[MarineVietVet]

During a dispute certain items on your report like payment history are removed from scoring. I would guess this is what is causing the score increase. Until the dispute is resolved you won't know whether the score will stay higher or go back down.

I'm not sure why you disputed in the first place if you were told the lates would be removed. The better tactic would have been to wait and see if Cap 1 followed up and actually removed the lates.

[Anonymous]

That makes sense. The reason I did that was the CSR suggested I do that as well to speed up process.

Also, if you FICO Score doesn't count lates while in dispute, would it be smart to app for something while they are up later in the future if that's the only thing hurting you?

Will update this thread if any news decreases/increases come up. Thanks for your help!