You're being a little imprecise with your terminology here, which may have contributed to folks thinking that this was not a comment which moved the discussion

You're being a little imprecise with your terminology here, which may have contributed to folks thinking that this was not a comment which moved the discussion forward. The ratings agencies (Moodys et al) rate debt, including particular securitization pools and/or corporate borrowers, but not consumer borrowers. FICO produces an algorithm which lenders use to rate consumer borrowers based on records retained by credit reporting agencies (CRAs). You, as a lender, can't call Equifax (a CRA) and say "Hey you said 690 but I think really 725." Their information says what it says regarding tradelines (the fact that they were delinquent on a CC 2 years ago is a fact on record that you can't alter), and you have no easy interface to modify that (though you can, and you do, encourage customers in marginal situations to do their own work on their credit). You ask why don't banks defraud the GSEs on a retail level for marginal loans. The short and perhaps unsatisfactory reason is that if the GSE is dissatisfied with a particular loan they'll put it back on you (you have to repurchase rather than securitizing) and that if you make a practice of this you're going to go to jail. Anecdotally, every time I look at my credit score I cringe The video game player in me understands that being told one has a score one wants to increase it, but, do you care about this number? Why? If you don't anticipate buying a house in the next 6 months it is all but irrelevant to you. If that is in your near term plans, then you have a fairly straightforward path to increasing it. (Stop paying off earlier than the reporting date, which can result in tradelines looking like they're dormant and therefore not counted towards your score.) Furthermore, every time I've ever applied for credit I end up with scores (and offers of credit) far in excess of the numbers... Yep, because the offers of credit are an actual fact about the world and the credit score is a point-in-time snapshot of a model which predicts a model that partially influences a decision that might be relevant to your interest. In the case where reality and your model differ, reality takes precedence, so why do you care what the model outputs?