Curious score drop

[sarge12]

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@HeavenOhio wrote:

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@sarge12 wrote:

Here is another caveat that inquiring minds might ponder, I have recieved alerts lately due to using a card that had been previously inactive. That leads me to believe that a card being unused for an extended period might mean that account is not being included in some calculations of AAoA, utilization or something. If not, why does it generate an alert? I would be interested if anyone has checked to see if that might be the case.

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@sarge12, I'm surprised you're still seeing that alert. The Equifax inactive alert on myFICO was dumped back in February. Are you seeing it on a different service?

At any rate, the alert would have everything to do with fraud protection and nothing to do with scoring. Unless a bank reports payment information (trended data), it's impossible to tell if a card has emerged from a period of inactivity by looking at a single credit report. However, monitoring services would have access to multiple reports. They use that capability all the time when generating alerts.

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I am not even sure which monitoring service it was, but may have just been to alert me to any possible fraudulant use of a card that had not been used in some time. In an age of identity theft and fraudulant card use, that would make some sense. Since identity protection is included in many of my credit cards monitoring services, that might be why I started getting the alert.