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My accounts were breached online - 6K was transferred from my Visa to my Checking account, then the hackers transferred the 6K out of my checking account and it's gone. The fraud investigation is taking care of the money and I will get it back but this can take up to 10 days and until then my Visa account will show a UTIL of 106% - all due to the fraud. They can't empty out this account before the next report to the agencies thus my credit score will tank - current FICO is 759.
I have gone as high up the ladder as I am able to with no luck - I will need to wait the 10 day period.
We all know that UTIL in not supposed to have a memory - we also all know that many on this board don't think that is true.
I am looking at buying a car in the next 30-Days and have been pre-approved for my auto loan by my credit union. I do not know what will occur, if anything,. when my credit score tanks. Perhaps they will pull back the approval. Holding off on purchasing the car will be difficult - had a recent car accident and the car is a total loss thus I have only 30-days for the insurance covered rental.
Thoughts or suggestions.
Get documentation from the bank and credit card due to the fraud. Hopefully the CU will take that into account when they finalize your car loan.
Also - close all your accounts and open with new account numbers.......so sorry for the mess you are in! Not fun I am sure.
@Anonymous wrote:Get documentation from the bank and credit card due to the fraud. Hopefully the CU will take that into account when they finalize your car loan.
Also - close all your accounts and open with new account numbers.......so sorry for the mess you are in! Not fun I am sure.
Update - so my CU pre-approved me for more than enough and will not pull my credit (already fed-ex'd me a blank check) so that's taken care of. ...
Now I'm just concerned about what this will do to my score. I believe I've done all I can but just want to make sure - am I missing anything. Is there anyway to have that account not report the balance? Freezing it or something, I dk...
If not I guess it'll be a good test for the UTIL memory debate...
Hi Tufa. There's two issues.
One is whether the CRA will store the information that the credit card company reports to them. The answer is that yes they will store it, yes it goes onto your report, and when the CCC reports a much lower balance the following month, that will not erase what they reported before. This is because CRAs now store the balance reported not only for the most recent month but for every month going back at least a year or so, often much longer.
The other issue is what fields from the CRA that FICO uses to compute your score. The current FICO models (and those in the past) only use the most recently reported balance when assessing CC utilization. That is because these models were made before the CRAs started storing many consecutive months of balance and payment history.
But future credit scoring models will almost certainly be designed to consider the much richer dataset that the CRAs now supply. Exactly how they will do it no one can say for sure.
So this means that in a couple months from now your FICO 8 score will be fine. But if you want to ensure that the 106% utilization during Nov 2015 for that card is never considered by any future credit scoring model or any manual underwriter, then you need to work with the creditor to have that data corrected by each CRA.
Even simpler would be to work with the creditor now and see if they will agree to not report it. That may be difficult for them, since what they report is probably done in an automated fashion. But they can submit a correction a few months later.
I am not taking a position on whether you need to get this corrected. I am just letting you know that, if you decide you don't want it in your credit file, then you have to do the usual legwork to get it removed. A reasonable approach might be to use Credit Karma now to track your reports weekly (and print hardcopies). By mid January the new (far lower and correct) balance should be reporting. At that time you can try getting a full blown credit report from ACR and see what the historical balances say during Oct-Dec. If you want your Nov 2015 balance to only report the charges you made, you'll have to work with CRA and creditor to get that changed.
@Anonymous wrote:Hi Tufa. There's two issues.
One is whether the CRA will store the information that the credit card company reports to them. The answer is that yes they will store it, yes it goes onto your report, and when the CCC reports a much lower balance the following month, that will not erase what they reported before. This is because CRAs now store the balance reported not only for the most recent month but for every month going back at least a year or so, often much longer.
The other issue is what fields from the CRA that FICO uses to compute your score. The current FICO models (and those in the past) only use the most recently reported balance when assessing CC utilization. That is because these models were made before the CRAs started storing many consecutive months of balance and payment history.
But future credit scoring models will almost certainly be designed to consider the much richer dataset that the CRAs now supply. Exactly how they will do it no one can say for sure.
So this means that in a couple months from now your FICO 8 score will be fine. But if you want to ensure that the 106% utilization during Nov 2015 for that card is never considered by any future credit scoring model or any manual underwriter, then you need to work with the creditor to have that data corrected by each CRA.
Even simpler would be to work with the creditor now and see if they will agree to not report it. That may be difficult for them, since what they report is probably done in an automated fashion. But they can submit a correction a few months later.
I am not taking a position on whether you need to get this corrected. I am just letting you know that, if you decide you don't want it in your credit file, then you have to do the usual legwork to get it removed. A reasonable approach might be to use Credit Karma now to track your reports weekly (and print hardcopies). By mid January the new (far lower and correct) balance should be reporting. At that time you can try getting a full blown credit report from ACR and see what the historical balances say during Oct-Dec. If you want your Nov 2015 balance to only report the charges you made, you'll have to work with CRA and creditor to get that changed.
@Anonymous is amazing info @Anonymous! That is exactly why I posted this eventhough it *seemed* like there was nothing else to do. I never thought about past data as I assumed that creditors just looked at one's credit score and not thier credit file/history but there is no gaurantee that won't change in the future and/or that some creditors are not doing it now. I thought about the not reporting for this month but, sadly, I knew that finding the right person to make that happen would be close to impossible. These these are surely automated getting one out of the 2,136,548 balances they report is just something that they wouldn't do - eventhough someone does have the power. BUT, again, I think the important aspect here is to make sure that they get that balance off my report at some time. TY!
Just checked Credit Karma - lost 131 points and dropped to 628 due to the 100%+ UTIL. It really hurts looking at that score.
@tufa4311 wrote:Just checked Credit Karma - lost 131 points and dropped to 628 due to the 100%+ UTIL. It really hurts looking at that score.
Hey it's a fako score so don't lose sleep over it. My CK score is 110 points lower than myFico score. Keep us posted though.
Karma has a nice feature where you can click just on the account you want to focus on. Then there is a link that gives you the option to compare how the account reads in EQ vs. TU. If I were you, I'd do that and print the results. You'll want to note the balance in both and the date the the issuer reported it to both. Then you can forget about it for 35 days and then look again.
Presumably the new balance will be reported by then and your Vantage scores will jump back to where they were. A similar catastrophic drop and recovery will have happened with FICO 8.
At that point you can decide whether you want to pursue getting the CCC to change the Nov 2015 balance in each of the three CRAs. You may need a full blown official credit report from ACR to do that.
@tufa4311 wrote:We all know that UTIL in not supposed to have a memory - we also all know that many on this board don't think that is true.
You'll always find various opinions on the internet. Revolving utilization is based on whatever is indicated as the balances and limits in the report that is used as a data source for the score being generated.
@tufa4311 wrote:Just checked Credit Karma - lost 131 points and dropped to 628 due to the 100%+ UTIL. It really hurts looking at that score.
Don't worry over CK's VantageScores unless you know you have creditors that use them. The same applies to any scoring model. Always consider the relevance of a specific model & CRA to a given creditor.
@tufa4311 wrote:I never thought about past data as I assumed that creditors just looked at one's credit score and not thier credit file/history but there is no gaurantee that won't change in the future and/or that some creditors are not doing it now.
We always say that it is never just about score. You entire credit profile always matters.
@datrucking210 wrote:Hey it's a fako score so don't lose sleep over it.
Do not rely on such oversimplifications. Again, always consider the scoring model & CRA and the relevance of a given combo to a creditor. There are creditors that use VantageScores. Additionally, there isn't just one FICO model. There are many FICO models used by creditors (see also the Understanding FICO Scoring subforum and its stickies) so you can't just assume that any FICO is valid for every creditor out there. Even with FICO the specific scoring model will have an impact on the number generated. Even with FICO some models are on different point scales. If your creditor/product uses an EQ FICO 4 then a TU FICO 8 will not be relevant for that creditor/product.
A FAKO like the TransUnion New Account model, for example, is however not used by any creditor.
The credit card balance has now been adjusted and I am back down to under 5% UTI. Credit Karma will update in 3 days, let's see if I get all 131 points back. My Discover FICO was last updated on 11/12 and my Barclaycard FICO last updated on 11/08 and are at 751 and 753, respectively, thus neither have been affected by the issue, yet...
Will update as to the final outcome on my next FICO updates.