@Anonymous wrote:I was under the impression that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act forbade banks from ignoring Authorized User accounts in the scoring model...? Regulation B, Section 6...Google: Boost My Score and click on Articles/Recent News. FICO conceded to Congress that they would continue to consider the tradelines in a testimony to Congress in August 2009...no?
How is ignoring AU's discrimination? If an applicant is all AU's, I nearly guaruntee you it can easily be thrown out by underwriting or even internal score models.
If it's legitimate, it's simple: get the person you're AUing on to co-sign the loan... which would arguably be traditional anyway for such a situation.
I didn't know that the billing address was reported, matching that with the address on the report would be crude and mistake-prone. I'll point out though that not everything which is reported to the bureaus shows up on the santized version of the data which we get as a consumer report. The lenders *wanted* AU's not to be scored, Fair Issac wouldn't have come out with that in their original FICO '08 model if it wasn't desired by their customers. Ergo, the banks could well be reporting something additional in the AU status.
I haven't had an AU either for myself or my providing one to someone else, so I don't know what goes on the application, but it could be as simple as asking "what is your relationship to the new user?" Such a data point could easily be reported to the bureaus, and taken into account by FICO, even if we have no knowledge of it explicitly. I'm not certain why they would've put out a fraudulent announcement, if they don't have some anti-AU-abuse factored in, there's customers (the banks, not us) with very deep pockets and very large legal staffs... to say nothing of the CRA's which would love to probably knock Fair Issac down a step or two in promoting their competing VantageScore.
