PSA: Your Credit Karma credit score is basically fake

Technically this is more of a /c/finance type beat, but since it's important info for all US Americans I figured I'd post here to reach more people.

Anyway, the credit score Credit Karma and some banks like Capital One give uses the VantageScore 3.0 model. The problem is that no lender, rental management company, or institution of substance actually uses it, and it can be off by 60 points or more from the one that they actually do use--your FICO score, with FICO 8 being the most commonly used score. Thankfully, you can see it for free using the below methods, differing on which Credit Bureau's score you'd like to see. They should all be within a few points of each other, but it never hurts to check.

• Experian: Sign up through experian.com. You can also pay an exorbitant monthly fee to see all three bureau's scores, or just use the 7 day free trial.

• Equifax: Sign up through myfico.com.

• TransUnion: The trickiest one--I think the only "free option" that isn't a complimentary feature from a credit card is the 7 day free trial from Experian.

Thanks to this I found out my credit score is actually ~20 points higher than what Credit Karma said it was. For my mom, it was ~50 points higher! That opens up a lot of doors for her in terms of balance transfers and CC debt consolidation.

Shoutout to Amerikkka for having this dumbshit system