@tyhollin wrote:I was in a discussion with a friend today about credit. He told me that years ago you could "buy" a better credit score with the guarantee of better credit in only a month or two. He said that it worked by paying people with excellent credit scores and a solid history of on-time payments to take a few of their accounts and add you as a co-signer or shared responsibility of the account for only a month or two to allow it to report on your credit file. Then remove you from the account. This would expand one's credit file and dilute negative information with positive information to make them look more credit worthy than they actually are.
This sounds insane to me and I would never dream of doing it, but I'm just curious if this is true or if anyone has ever heard of anything like this?
There were such credit card mills who sold the use of long time aged peoples credit to others to be added as an AU, its the main reason Fico tried to completely exclude AUs from Fico calculations in their 08 version. There are such places still around today but the creditors have basically caught on to the scam and will discount AUs if there is no family connection.
@gdale6 wrote:There were such credit card mills who sold the use of long time aged peoples credit to others to be added as an AU, its the main reason Fico tried to completely exclude AUs from Fico calculations in their 08 version. There are such places still around today but the creditors have basically caught on to the scam and will discount AUs if there is no family connection.
As they should. IMHO an AU account should be 100% worthless when it comes to credit scoring.
Sure I could be 18 and jump on my mom's CC that she's made perfect payment history on for the last 25 years, but in the end how does that reflect my creditworthiness? It doesn't. The only thing it might possibly reflect is the fact mom would be there to bail me out if I ran up her CC debt.
