What the??? Why do I have different fico scores?

[GRAD-With-BADCREDIT]

Hello,

All I have been trying to repair my credit for a year now.  I would like to purchase a new car but now my hopes have just been washed down the drain.  I just pulled my fico scores from Credit Adaptor and got a totally different fico score than from Scorewatch.

My Equifax score here on the site is 608.

However Credit Adaptor is reporting these numbers:

EQ:523

EX: 499

TU: 514

Which score should I believe? 

This credit situation is too stressful!  Please help. 

[Anonymous]

---

@GRAD-With-BADCREDIT wrote:

Hello,

All I have been trying to repair my credit for a year now.  I would like to purchase a new car but now my hopes have just been washed down the drain.  I just pulled my fico scores from Credit Adaptor and got a totally different fico score than from Scorewatch.

My Equifax score here on the site is 608.

However Credit Adaptor is reporting these numbers:

EQ:523

EX: 499

TU: 514

Which score should I believe? 

This credit situation is too stressful!  Please help. 

---

Credit Adapter is not real scores, they are FAKO not FICO.

Ex FICO cannot be purchased by the public any longer (only lenders) and therefore the only real scores you will be able to get are your TU and EQ FICO scores from this site (or from those CRAs directly by going and purchasing their specialized FICO scores (not just the general scores they offer on their regular websites))

[haulingthescoreup]

--and once you do untangle which scores are FICO and which are FAKO (while remembering that you simply cannot buy an EX FICO any more), do realize that your scores will still be different.

This is for two reasons:

1 - Each CRA commissions its own scoring formula from FICO, and each seems to have different obsessions. Equifax seems to penalize lates more than the others, TU may or may not hit folks who don't have mortgages; EX might look at the dollar figure of your balances. (I'm probably wrong on the last two, but I'm quite sure about Equifax and lates, lol.) So your credit profile is being crunched by different formulas, so you'll get different scores.

2 - Very, very few of us have identical histories on all three reports. Usually you'll find that there is one ancient CC that only shows on one report, and makes that report have a longer credit age, or an account that appears on all three will have a different history - a single 30-day on one, and a 30-60 on the other two. As your scores are crunched from the info on your reports, it stands to reason that different data will result in different scores. Plus the varying formulas, as explained above.

But your main problem now is that you've got FAKO's in the mix, and they make educated comparisons impossible.