Credit Repair Glossary

• Authorized User

  A person allowed to charge goods and services on a credit card by the primary user of that card. Authorized users—unlike users of a joint account—are not legally responsible for payment.  Recently, a number of credit repair or credit improvement companies have claimed that they can guarantee an increase in your credit score by providing you with an authorized user account.  To limit the use and effectiveness of this technique, Fair Isaacs recently announced changes to their FICO scoring system to limit the benefits of authorized user accounts.  We previously discussed the changes to the FICO score in our blog entry about FICO 08.