Since my bank provides me with monthly FICO scores, i don’t bother to check the so-called credit bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and whatever the hell the third one is called — Equifax.

But on a friends advice, I go on Experian to check — she wants me to maybe co-sign a loan for her, and that’s the bureau her mortgage service uses — and it gives me some score about 150 points lower than my own banks’s FICO score, and i figured that’s odd, but whatever. So i sign up for their free service, and i’ve been a “Member of Experian” now for like a month, and mysteriously my “credit score” there has slowly risen about 50 points — but at the same time it stayed exactly the same in my own bank (which is still a hundred-and-some points higher).

So now i get that Experian is just trying to sell me their stupid credit services, like credit monitoring or credit protection, blah blah blah. It’s a bunch of crap.

They are in business to help you “improve” your credit score — double-talk for paying them to artificially improve it. It’s just a pay-to-play scheme; the more of their services you sign up for, the more they raise the credit score they report in your name.

It’s a scam.

Experian is just another for-profit company that got in big with other banks. They reported making $7.5 billion in the last fiscal year. The difference is that they’re one of the big three who hold your “official” credit score hostage.

So if i want to borrow money, i do so from my own bank — and i don’t care what Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax say.

Turns out your credit score from one of the three for-profit “credit bureaus” means very little.

Fuck ‘em.

Arrange lending from your own bank.

Ignore the “Big Three.”