Starting September 2007, the newest version of the FICO scoring module will ignore all authorized user information when computing scores. The company that created FICO, Fair Isaac Corporation, changed the formula after learning that some credit repair companies were “buying” authorized user slots on the credit cards of people with good scores and “renting” those slots to strangers with bad credit to quickly boost their scores. This made it look like the bad credit person had a long history of build good credit and credit card balance with a high credit limit and very low balance, thus effectively lowering their debt to credit ratio and increasing their history. Credit scores would increase dramatically for them. Not a bad idea and since it still works for the older scoring modules of which most creditors still use, I would suggest not “buying” a slot but borrowing a family members slot on a good card to do the same thing. We call it “piggybacking”.

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