Category: Credit Report

Service Review: Consumer Credit Reporting / Monitoring and Identity Theft Protection Services

Posted by Brady – June 27, 2009

This post lists out major service provider in credit reporting/monitoring and identity theft protection.  Credit repairing has got a bad name due to some businesses’ abusive activities, therefore businesses providing that service have been excluded for readers’ benefit.

Please feel free to share with us any of your unhappy experience with these agencies so that this list can be maintained constantly useful to readers.

Credit Reporting/Monitoring

myFICO® is the consumer division of Fair Isaac, the company that invented the FICO® credit risk score that lenders use. Starting in the 1960s, Fair Isaac sparked a revolution by pioneering credit risk scoring for the financial services industry. This new approach to lending enabled financial institutions to improve their business performance and expand consumers’ access to credit. Today Fair Isaac’s FICO® score is widely recognized as the industry standard for lenders.

myFICO® offers Score Watch service to consumers, the service includes

  • delivery of FICO score regularly
  • send warnings when FICO score change
  • send notification when customer is qualified for certain loan

Equifax is public listed company, member of S&P 500 index.  On Consumer service side, Equifax offers credit management products like 3-in-1 Credit Report and Score Watch help consumers make informed decisions when making purchases, securing loans, paying for college educations, and managing their personal finances.

Identity theft is the fastest growing white collar crime in America. One in five families have been affected by this epidemic. Identity theft protection products like Equifax’s Credit Watch Gold™ with 3-in-1 Monitoring continually monitor consumers’ credit files and alert them of potentially fraudulent activity like a new credit card application that they did not initiate.

CreditReport.com provides free credit reports and credit scores to consumers in a secure, online environment. Its Credit Monitoring service alerts customers to changes across all 3 of their credit reports while Credit Score Tracking notifies customers to significant changes in their credit score.

Identity Theft Protection

As identify theft is the fastest growing crime in United States,  protection services emerge in response to proactively protect consumers from this crime.

TrustedID’s®  innovative flagship product – IDFreeze® – stops identity theft before it ever happens. Secured from identity theft by their 15 points of protection which includes protection for children, seniors, and medical records.  In addition, TrustedID’s® also rolled out a new product Identity Threat Score™ on Oct. 27, 2009, which provides a gauge of an individual’s risk of identity theft by assessing millions of records on hundreds of public and private databases. This information is then analyzed for patterns that could indicate if the customer has been or is about to be a victim of identity theft.

IdentityTruth.com provides identity theft protection services starting from $10/month.  They use innovative technology to offer customers the earliest possible notificationTM of identity misuse and threats. IdentityTruth is a privately held, VC- funded company headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. Investors include Argonaut Ventures and Stata Venture Partners.  They are offering customers the chance to test our services on a risk free basis before making a purchase.

ID Watchdog offers patent-pending technology that continually scans thousands of credit, social security, DMV, medical, public records and other databases.  They search for fraudulent activity and notify you of anything suspicious.

Also included in the free trial offer of ID Watchdog Plus is a free ID Theft Profile.  This cross references thousands of databases, checks for any instances of previous ID theft and is valued at $19.95.

LifeLock provides a proactive identity theft service, specializing in the prevention of identity theft rather than the reporting of it. LifeLock was founded in 2005.

Also refer to my previous post: Credit Score Q&A

Credit Score Q&A: Positive and Negative Actions on FICO Score

Posted by Brady – December 16, 2008

Q: if you cancel/close a credit card account within a short time (lets say 6 months) you took it, will it affect your credit score?

A:  It will probably not.  This kind of behavior should fall into the “New Credit” section that is in your credit report, however, since the majority of this section is to figure out your interest to new credit, the more you are interested, the more negative to your credit.  Given this guideline, if you close new accounts shortly, that doesn’t affect your credit score negatively.

References: How Your FICO Credit Score is calculated from myFICO.com.  You may also find out your FICO score by visiting here.

FICO Scores are calculated from a lot of different credit data in your credit report. This data can be grouped into five categories as outlined below. The percentages in the chart reflect how important each of the categories is in determining your FICO score.

What's in your FICO?

These percentages are based on the importance of the five categories for the general population. For particular groups – for example, people who have not been using credit long – the importance of these categories may be somewhat different.

Payment History

  • Account payment information on specific types of accounts (credit cards, retail accounts, installment loans, finance company accounts, mortgage, etc.)
  • Presence of adverse public records (bankruptcy, judgements, suits, liens, wage attachments, etc.), collection items, and/or delinquency (past due items)
  • Severity of delinquency (how long past due)
  • Amount past due on delinquent accounts or collection items
  • Time since (recency of) past due items (delinquency), adverse public records (if any), or collection items (if any)
  • Number of past due items on file
  • Number of accounts paid as agreed

Amounts Owed

  • Amount owing on accounts
  • Amount owing on specific types of accounts
  • Lack of a specific type of balance, in some cases
  • Number of accounts with balances
  • Proportion of credit lines used (proportion of balances to total credit limits on certain types of revolving accounts)
  • Proportion of installment loan amounts still owing (proportion of balance to original loan amount on certain types of installment loans)

Length of Credit History

  • Time since accounts opened
  • Time since accounts opened, by specific type of account
  • Time since account activity

New Credit

  • Number of recently opened accounts, and proportion of accounts that are recently opened, by type of account
  • Number of recent credit inquiries
  • Time since recent account opening(s), by type of account
  • Time since credit inquiry(s)
  • Re-establishment of positive credit history following past payment problems

Types of Credit Used

  • Number of (presence, prevalence, and recent information on) various types of accounts (credit cards, retail accounts, installment loans, mortgage, consumer finance accounts, etc.)

Also check out service review of credit reporting/monitoring and identity theft services