Comments on: Credit Report Cards: Credit.com vs. Credit Karma

By: sean

sean — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:47:13 +0000

I signed up for Credit Karma on Saturday. Monday was the first time in 2 years a collection agency was chain calling my house. Credit Karma is most defiantly collecting information for collection agencies.

By: Donald

Donald — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 06:27:43 +0000

I just pulled the score from My Fico and got a 793. (I’m shopping for a loan) Credit Karma list my score as 791 wow impressive. Only two points off.

By: Winning Player

Winning Player — Sun, 15 May 2011 14:54:10 +0000

CreditKarma.com and Credit.com are scams! CreditKarma said I had two bad strikes on my credit report and offered a paid subscription to help me clean it up. Credit.com did the same thing, giving me an “F” for payment history stating I had too many late payments. Well, folks, I have PERFECT credit, my credit score is 825-850 (it does fluctuate some) and have NEVER EVER EVER had even a ONE day late payment in my entire 57 years. Go directly to AnnualCreditReport.com for a FREE annual credit report from the three bona-fide credit reporting agencies (I get one from one of the 3 agencies every four months) and pay about $8 for a TRUE credit score—not the crap CreditKarma.com and Credit.com are feeding people. Then follow the instructions if you need to update or dispute any info and it will be done quickly. Unless you are dealing DIRECTLY with Equifax, Experian, or Trans Union, you can pretty well assume you are being scammed. Now I’m worried about what they are doing with my personal info. Can you say “identity theft?”

By: Ferodynamics

Ferodynamics — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 06:04:04 +0000

I tried to sign up for CreditKarma but it said I already had an account. Which is not true.

My account is “flagged as a dupe.” Based on what information? My social security number? They don’t have my email address in their database because I clicked “Forgot my password” and that didn’t work. The reason I can’t get into the site is unclear.

So I’m wondering if it’s a scam, you give them all kinds of detailed personal info through the sign-up form, then they provide you nothing in return and probably resell the info behind your back. If the same thing happens to you, let me know.

By: mlk2

mlk2 — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:37:19 +0000

The scores Credit Karma offers have nothing to do with actually acquiring credit.

Be careful in signing up for free credit monitoring via any of your financial services. Read the TOS closely. Credit Karma has partnered with a number of financial services to provide these services but what they don’t tell you is that the service is third party and that you are authorizing a third party to access your credit from any number of places.

Credit Karma is one of these scam services.

I had the unfortunately experience of bumping into them via my Sears credit card. Sears offered “free credit monitoring” from my Sears credit card.

What they didn’t tell me (and what is not disclosed on the web site where you check your credit) is that the service is really a third party service that can access your credit scores whenever they want. What Sears didn’t say was that their so called service at http://www.searscreditscore.com was actually run via Credit Karma, which gave Credit Karma access to credit scores without agreement.

If you want to cancel this service you will have to be persistant. Credit Karma has NO means to contact them except via email. My emails were unanswered for days. They will NOT reply to specific questions but only give you a canned response that often has nothing to do with your question.

Free is not always free.

By: Edward Dowdle

Edward Dowdle — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:47:51 +0000

First time looking at this service.

By: Flexo

Flexo — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:08:31 +0000

Thanks for sharing your observations, Juggler. I imagine other people will see lots of interesting differences between Credit.com’s data and Credit Karma’s data.

By: Flexo

Flexo — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:15:48 +0000

Like Eric mentioned, Credit Karma does a soft pull on your credit, not affecting your score. Credit.com does the same.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:05:44 +0000

Credit Karma imposes “soft” inquiries so it won’t harm your score every time you pull.

Personally (because of inertia more than anything), I think I’ll just with Credit Karma. However I really appreciate the comparison as I was waiting for someone to do it.Timely!

Thanks Flexo!

By: David@DINKSFinance

David@DINKSFinance — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:48:49 +0000

I would prefer CreditKarma due to the additional categories and less advertisements about upgrading for some fee. To me these are more important than the small difference in accuracy.

By: Kelly

Kelly — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:33:03 +0000

I personally thought credit.com did a decent job of telling me my “grade”, but it was too vague in the assessment of the actual number.

It also said I had multiple credit inquires the last being from 9/09.

Flexo do you know if creditkarma.com is considered an inquiry? Other than credit karma, I have not used any credit related service or requested increases nor applied for new cards.

By: Juggler314

Juggler314 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:04:58 +0000

David, Did you try writing a good will letter for your creditor with the 30 day late? if you generally are a good customer (both before and after) sometimes they will erase it. I’ve never done one myself by the folks over at the myfico forums have many tips on it.

By: David

David — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:12:20 +0000

I just tried out Credit.com’s report card too and, although it looks great, I am skeptical of its accuracy, too. It gives me an A+ when I know my actual score range is 680-700 because of high (but declining) utilization and a stupid 30-day late payment a bit over a year ago. My credit should be more like a “C” or “B-” if you ask me. CreditKarma seems to be more accurate in that regard with its estimated scores for me hovering in the 680-700 range.

By: Juggler314

Juggler314 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:11:08 +0000

agreed, but at least for me, even the “credit report card” bit on credit.com was *way* out of whack with reality.

one thing I’ve noticed about fako scores while diligently tracking both my fico and some fako scores is that even though the fakos obviously aren’t real they tend to roughly track the fico scores. By that I mean if you graph both over time the shape of the graph is similar (pay down debt and both will go up, etc).

By: Ann-Marie

Ann-Marie — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:14:08 +0000

I think it’s important to differentiate here between the “credit report card” that you get on these sites and a REAL credit report. Neither site offers a real credit report from one of the three credit bureaus, only a subjective assessment of what’s on your credit report. While these assessments may give you a general idea of what’s affecting your credit score, in the case that you get a low grade, you’ll need to pull your full credit report to find out what specific account is hurting your credit.

By: Juggler314

Juggler314 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:22:19 +0000

Hmm…well i just tried out credit.com and while it may offer a bit more detail, i don’t think whatever scoring model it is using is even remotely accurate. It told me I had “one of the highest credit scores possible”. But I know this is not true from pulling my own FICO scores. Several issues – it seems to have ignored my BK (it sees it, but it doesn’t drag the score down, or the many 90+ lates associated with that BK). It also has my AAoA higher than it is in reality. Credit Karma, while not an actual FICO score at least tracked roughly equivalent to FICO scores. It’s worth noting that even 750 which is the low end of the score range is at least 30 points over my actual score. Let alone the top end of the “range”.

I hope that’s just the new service not being that accurate…

Also credit karma will pull your report every day if you want, credit.com only pulls it once/30 days.

I’m not sure why, based on, seemingly, only one small discrepancy (that credit karma is not correctly pulling an old account), you would decide that credit.com is more accurate. It could be that the data it is getting is also incorrect and it is no fault of Credit Karma at all.

Looking through the summary data on credit.com it seems to be taking an overly optimistic view of my credit report. It says I have 2 mortgages and 3 auto loans when in reality I have only 2 old mortgages (no longer part of my credit report) and just one auto loan (the other two are one much older one and a the original one before I refi’d my current loan).

I’ll check back in a couple of months, but right now, at least for me, credit.com does not represent anything even remotely helpful as every other reporting gives me a lower score (both FICO’s + severale FAKO scores).