topic Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for?? in myFICO® Product Feedback

FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 03:17:26 GMT

I have been a loyal customer of MyFICO for over 10 years. I still have access to my very first Quarterly Monitoring report on 5/19/2004.

If you are familiar with the product, you get 4 TransUnion FICO scores and daily monitoring for changes to your personal information. Explicitly the MyFICO advertises that they check daily for new accounts and recent applications for credit. Weekly I get a very assuring e-mail stating that all is well:

FICO® QUARTERLY MONITORING

STATUS: ALL CLEAR

Dear XXXXXXXXXX,

Good news! We did not find any changes in your personal identity information this week.

I've looked back in my e-mail and I have literally gotten hundreds of these exact messages. It is all very reassuring.

Now here is the problem, since my last score and credit report on 5/17/2014 I have had 6 hard credit pulls and 3 new accounts opened totalling over $250k in new credit extended.

My weekly monitoring e-mail from MyFICO still says they haven't found any changes and all is clear! In fact, the last time the weekly e-mail said something was potentially wrong in my account was in September of 2013.

I want to know what I've been paying for?!?! MyFICO's daily monitoring has done me no good at all.

How did I see all of this? Credit Karma...for free. On top of that, as the credit pulls continue to come in, I get daily alerts (actual, useful alerts) as to balance changes, new accounts, and credit pulls.

MyFICO continues to tell me all is clear (latest e-mail was this morning) as Credit Karma has sent me 20 useful alerts in the last 6 weeks. Why is the service I am paying for doing none of this?

A frustrated MyFICO user.

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

pizzadude — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:57:55 GMT

Do you know for certain that the new accounts / inquries are showing on Equifax? Scorewatch only looks at EQ. Credit Karma is TU.

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 03:44:43 GMT

I don't subscribe to ScoreWatch, I subscribe to the Quarterly Monitoring which is based on TU.

@pizzadude wrote:

Do you know for certain that the new accounts / inquries are showing on Equifax? Scorewatch only looks at EQ. Credit Karma is TU.

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 03:53:10 GMT

Directly copied from the MyFICO site under the FICO Quarterly Monitoring description:

Personal Identity Data Monitoring

Protect your identity

11.6 million Americans are affected by identity theft annually. To reduce your potential exposure to identity theft, we

conduct daily monitoring of online sources where social security number, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers

could be found, traded or sold. Alerts are provided for the purpose of giving you an early notification when a change is

detected on your personal identity data.

Here is a summary of the data sources monitored for information tied to your identity:

Publicly recorded changes to name, date of birth, or social security number
Newly listed addresses, phone numbers and employers
Newly opened accounts and recent applications for new credit
Newly listed public records, such as bankruptcies, foreclosures, and tax liens
Newly listed collection company records

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

TheFate — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 04:14:19 GMT

I would call first thing in the morning and find out whats going on thats unacceptable

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 14:03:28 GMT

@TheFate wrote:
I would call first thing in the morning and find out whats going on thats unacceptable

Oh, I have. All I have gotten is the run around. They started with "We only monitor for identity theft on a daily basis with the Quarterly Monitoring". Where I pointed them directly to their own marketing materials on MyFico.com that states that the service monitors daily for "Newly opened accounts and recent applications for new credit". In addition to a lot of other things.

What else could be bigger to monitor for detecting identity theft than hard pulls on your credit and new accounts?!?! The CSR pointed me to changes that showed up on my quarterly report that is over 2 months old as proof that they are detecting the changes. I asked her if she thought that once every 3 months equated to daily monitoring? She did finally agree that something wasn't right.

All MyFICO customer service has said is they will escalate the issue to upper management. I'm waiting on a call back.

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

pizzadude — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 14:51:41 GMT

PrimeRisk wrote:

I don't subscribe to ScoreWatch, I subscribe to the Quarterly Monitoring which is based on TU.

pizzadude wrote:

Do you know for certain that the new accounts / inquries are showing on Equifax? Scorewatch only looks at EQ. Credit Karma is TU.

My bad -- I missed that in your post, sorry.

I agree it looks like there's an issue ~ I hope they can resolve for you

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 15:38:50 GMT

No worries pizzadude

Yeah, I hope they get it fixed too. I'm a long-time user of the service (since May 2004) and while I like it and have suggested it to many others, this isn't good as I'm primarily concerned that I've had this false sense of security by getting weekly assurances that I'm being monitored and all is well. I've looked back through my weekly "All Clear" messages back 5 years and there have only been a few times anything has been flagged. What has been flagged has normally been new addresses, but they're also false positives because it's just permutations and misspellings of my actual address.

I hope that MyFICO has a reasonable explanation for all of the missed monitoring. If not, I'm not sure I can ever trust the monitoring again.

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

EW800 — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 21:17:34 GMT

PrimeRisk: Thanks for letting us know what you have experienced. Please let us know what they report back to you!

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 23:54:26 GMT

So the wait continues. I have only had two other issues over 10 years where I needed to contact Customer Service (other than to change my credit card number). The first one was way back in 2004 to resolve a FICO discrepancy between my bank and MyFICO back when they advertised that MyFICO was the one and only real FICO score. While true, we also now know that there's a king-sized bucket of different versions of a FICO score. The next issue involved my FICO score not changing for 9 months. In both cases, while I had to contact customer service time after time to get the issue resolved, they did seem to show genuine concern and would call me back in something reasonably close to 48 hours.

Apparently the 3rd time isn't a charm for me.

The experience on this issue is markedly different. When I called again today, because the 48 hour window was well blown, I was greeted by a rather unfriendly woman with a condesending tone. She more or less scolding me I didn't subscribe to a service that did daily monitoring and I'd have to wait until my next quarterly score to get information. Then she started selling me on subscribing to ScoreWatch if I wanted daily monitoring. I asked her to stop selling me on a different product and read her the quote directly from their own website:

Provide peace of mind

We are monitoring your identity information daily and will send you immediate alerts via wireless text message when a change is detected on your personal identity data.

We’re monitoring your identity information daily and your FICO® Score and credit report quarterly. Reduce your exposure to identity theft with immediate alerts via mobile text message when a change is detected.

E-mail alerts when changes in public information are detected
Archive of past alerts
Checklist to help you review your credit report for signs of ID theft
Option to receive weekly E-mail updates whether changes are detected or not
Simple and easy-to-use
Secure, instant online access
Alerts interpretation guide

To this she had no answer and started repeating that I apparently wanted ScoreWatch. I don't need daily monitoring of my score, but I thought I was paying for daily monitoring of identity theft. I again asked her to answer what the daily monitoring and weekly monitoring messages were monitoring. She then became very abrupt and said Quarterly Monitoriing only provided information quarterly, that she had explained it to me already, and that if I wasn't satisfied and thought she didn't know her own products I could wait on hold and have her supervisor tell me the exact same thing.

Well then, isn't that nice. They won't answer WHAT they monitor daily and demand they have answered the question. i asked what happened to the previous escallation that they were supposed to call me back on Monday and she said that her supervisor would explain it. Of course after about 20 mminutes on the phone, the supervisor is tied up. They'll call me back in 24-48 hours again...maybe. Well, so much for their customer service.

Methinks it may be time to stop patronizing MyFICO.

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 13:56:39 GMT

Well, the drama continues on this issue. I have been in contact with MyFICO customer service multiple times and at a minimum I think there is a basic lack of understanding of my complaint. The last respons was a form-letter e-mail providing me with a code for a free TU FICO Standard report (Valued at $9.90!) and the issue was marked closed. (If I feel that this issue is not resolved to my satisfaction, I can contact them again)

What is the point of paying $50/year for a service if all it actually gives you is 4 $9.90 reports and nothing else?

Personal credit reporting update:

8/5 Alert from the absolutely free Credit Karma: New Car Loan in the amount of $xx,xxxx
8/6 E-mail from MyFICO quarterly monitoring: "No Alerts thw week from myFICO"

**bleep**?

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 14:08:52 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Well, the drama continues on this issue. I have been in contact with MyFICO customer service multiple times and at a minimum I think there is a basic lack of understanding of my complaint. The last respons was a form-letter e-mail providing me with a code for a free TU FICO Standard report (Valued at $9.90!) and the issue was marked closed. (If I feel that this issue is not resolved to my satisfaction, I can contact them again)

What is the point of paying $50/year for a service if all it actually gives you is 4 $9.90 reports and nothing else?

Personal credit reporting update:
8/5 Alert from the absolutely free Credit Karma: New Car Loan in the amount of $xx,xxxx
8/6 E-mail from MyFICO quarterly monitoring: "No Alerts thw week from myFICO"
**bleep**?

PrimeRisk,

Sorry that you experienced this. Honestly it is not cool. I hope it does get resolved. With that said, I cancelled my scorewatch a couple of months back as it wasn't really timely or accurate. In my early stages of the rebuild process I was adding TLs quite frequently. So, I'd get updates from TU and Experian (CK and CreditSesame) but nothing from ScoreWatch. So I'd bite the bullet and purchase a new myFico report and score - Just to see how it affected, and sure enough the updates were done on the new report, but not caught by scorewatch. It is a great product when it works, but my reasoning for canceling it was that if the reports and alerts are not timely, I don't need to spend the money on it as it defeats the purpose.

Once again, I hope it gets resolved.

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Aug 2014 17:48:55 GMT

On the phone with myFICO customer service again. Again, I have to explain it over and over and over again that the service is advertised as offering DAILY monitoring and "immediate status alerts" when changes are detected. The CSRs just keep repeating over and over that there is ONLY quarterly alerts to changes in information.

While this is apparently the service they are providing, it is not the service I was sold. I was sold DAILY monitoring of my Personal Identity Data. What I'm getting is a bunch of excuses.

Re: FICO Quarterly Monitoring - What have I been paying for??

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Aug 2014 18:15:28 GMT

Well, the final chapter in the saga has been written. As of now, I am no longer a customer of myFICO. After wading through all of the double speak and denials, I've found out that there actually IS an escalation point when you call into customer service. I got to talk to one such "gem" after going through the regular denials at the CSR level.

With this manager we finally had a breakthrough; an admission that something is actually wrong. Well, I had to trap them with their own documentation stating that they were researching the problem. I knew they had issued a code for a free report, the manager read off the notes stating that the monitoring on my account wasn't functioning and upper level support was researching and that they believed this was an "isolated incident". Ok then, what's the incident they're researching if there isn't any problem? That's when we had the breakthrough.

Bottom line is that myFICO's customer service has gone to the dogs

The service itself does not work...well, at least for me if you believe the "isolated incident" comment

They recognize there is an issue, but apparently don't have any urgency to do anything about it

After over 10 years as a faithful, paying customer, I have lost all confidence in the services provided by myFICO. I will supposedly be issued a full refund and I will no longer subscribe. I will not use and cannot recommend any of myFICO's services. Do you want to find out that their monitoring service is broken on your account like it is on mine? You better believe that is the hard way to find out.

I suggest you head on over to CreditCarma.com where you get Weekly TU credit reports with scores and daily monitoring that ACTUALLY WORKS. I am walking proof that CreditCarma.com works when directly compared to the services at myFICO. Oh, and CreditCarma.com is a bit cheaper than myFICO...it's free.

See you there!