This is why I love providing advice to people. I may be the president of the Myvesta Foundation, an international group that helps people around the world, but my goodness it is important to stay in touch with what is happening on the streets.

Yesterday on Myvesta.TV I was doing my live Q&A online show (11am to Noon ET) and someone asked me about piggybacking credit scores. It caught me by surprise. I guess I slept through that whole issue. But after the show was over I did my homework and was uncomfortably surprised by what I discovered.

Piggybacking is the process of renting out your good FICO score and credit history for cash by allowing someone to become an authorized user on one of your good lines of credit. That process in the past has been a small loophole that is now being exploited to artificially raise the credit score of someone with damaged credit. Groups like Credit Advocate Services at http://raiseficofast , Instant Credit Builders at http://instantcreditbuilders.com and Seasoned Trades at http://seasonedtrades.com are all offering this type of service.

Technically the process apparently worked in the past but it has some big risks associated with it. The other major problem is that it is designed to game or fake your FICO score into being something it is not. Rather than suck up a bad score by piggybacking it makes much more sense to actually repair your own credit by getting a copy of your consolidated credit report or credit score and fixing or addressing whatever is bringing it down.

We could argue for hours about how people are judged by credit scores that are developed by a secret formula by others to judge the risk and profitability of extending you credit. Look, a FICO score or generic credit score is what it is and all I’m arguing is that you can improve your by paying some damn attention to your own credit report.

While all the credit reports I’ve looked at over the past five years contain errors that could lower a credit score, paying someone to rent their credit as an authorized user isn’t a real solution.

I’d almost forgotten to write about this until I came in this morning and my inbox had two spam messages about how I could raise my score by piggybacking off someone else. I’m afraid that good consumers are going to get snagged in this old loophole that is now turning scamish.

Fair Isaac & Company, the developers of the FICO score, have had enough of this and have announced they are closing the loophole on credit score boosting and will no longer consider the history of a line of credit if you are just an authorized user.

According to the folks at Fair Isaac “The newest FICO® scoring models will ignore authorized user accounts when calculating FICO® credit risk scores. This action is intended to protect lenders and FICO® scores from abuse of authorized user credit card accounts by a new kind of credit repair service that sells consumer credit card histories to credit applicants in order to purposefully misrepresent the applicants' own credit history to lenders and other businesses.”

The painful lesson to be learned by many that play this game is that when you paid $150 a month to link your credit score to someone with good credit as an authorized user, if that persons credit rating goes down, you will get dragged down with them.

Also, since you are now an authorized user and listed at the address of a person you don’t know, new offers for credit will start arriving in your name at that the other persons address. You are now more likely to be a victim of identity theft if that other person, that you paid to link to, feels like doing something stupid.

My vote if you are considering doing this is to walk away.