Mint.com is now offering free credit scores to it’s members. The score they are provided is not a FICO score, instead it is a FAKO score under the name of “Equifax® credit score”. In addition to this free product, they are also offering a premium credit monitoring product “Mint Credit Monitor Services”.
At the moment the free credit score is only available to selected users to participate in the closed beta, whilst everybody is able to sign up for their premium product which costs $16.99 per month. When reading the fine print there was one thing in particular which I found weird.
The credit score provided to you is an Equifax® credit score, based on a proprietary credit model developed by Equifax, which may use information in your Equifax, Experian and TransUnion credit files
Emphasis mine, it’s strange that something called an Equifax credit score might actually be based on data found in your Experian or TransUnion credit reports.
It’s nice that Mint is wanting to offer free credit scores to consumers, it’s disappointing that they will not be providing a credit score that is actually used by creditors though. They also have a lot of competition, there are lots of ways to get your FICO score for free and there are also a bunch of sites already offering free FAKO scores with credit monitoring and credit tools (which is basically what their premium product is). Here are the reviews of free credit monitoring sites which we’ve done in the past:
Oddly some mint staff are claiming it is a FICO score.
https://mint.lc.intuit.com/questions/974560-what-type-of-credit-score-is-this