Which is FAKO?

[StarraeAday1]

I recently pulled my TU CR from here on MyFico, and it said my score was 618. Shortly thereafter, I received a response to a dispute with TU, in which they deleted an old collection account. It offered a score from TU's site if you paid a small fee, so I did. It said my new score was 682! I've been looking to refinance a VERY crappy car loan, and that seemed to be my sign. I went to a CU the very next day, and they pulled my TU score and told me it was 669. WTF? Any ideas? I was kind of disconcerted. Thank you.

[laz98]

i believe if you go to www.transunioncs.com, then it is a true FICO score.  but www.transunion.com sells FAKOs.

[haulingthescoreup]

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StarraeAday1 wrote:
I recently pulled my TU CR from here on MyFico, and it said my score was 618. Shortly thereafter, I received a response to a dispute with TU, in which they deleted an old collection account. It offered a score from TU's site if you paid a small fee, so I did. It said my new score was 682! I've been looking to refinance a VERY crappy car loan, and that seemed to be my sign. I went to a CU the very next day, and they pulled my TU score and told me it was 669. WTF? Any ideas? I was kind of disconcerted. Thank you.

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Hi, and welcome to our bewildering world.

First of all, what TU so graciously offered to sell you was their TransRisk score, aka FAKO. If you scroll down to the very bottom of your report, you'll see in the eensiest, teensiest, palest grey print that the score is not a FICO.

What you bought here was a FICO TU, but it was a TU 98. This is an older version of the FICO TU score (which is the same score that you will get from www.transunioncs.com, note the -cs.) There is a newer FICO TU score out there called TU 04, which is now used by many lenders. But I suspect that as you were buying a car, what was pulled was the "auto-enhanced" TU FICO score, one which is meant to be especially predictive of your credit risk on an auto loan. If you had an auto loan in the past, and it has a clean history, you might well have a higher auto-enhanced TU FICO score, as opposed to your classic TU FICO score.

So to sum it up, ignore the score that TU so kindly sold you (the 682.) Take the myFICO TU score as semi-OK, but with a grain of salt, as most lenders now use TU 04. As for the score that your CU pulled, you might ask if that was an auto-enhanced score, or if it was a TU 04. They will probably be incredibly impressed at these questions, and there's a good chance that they just won't know. If it was auto-enhanced, it won't necessarily match your TU FICO score, whether 98 or 04

Anyway, I hope that you got your car OK, and that you're happy with it!

Excuse me, I need to go get an adult beverage and settle myself back down.

[StarraeAday1]

Thank you for your responses. It actually makes perfect sense that they may have pulled the auto-enhanced score, because MyFico is only showing my TU score as 645. No, they didn't approve me actually. She said my 669 was good enough to approve, but that they wanted to see a full year's payment on the existing crappy auto loan. No thank you! I'll be shopping around elsewhere. Anyway, thank you again!