"Aged" Primary Trade Lines

The very term is contradictory.
A few years ago, one of the leading brokers in the authorized user trade line business in California got very aggressive with their advertizing by bringing it to television. This person spoke with CNN's Paula Zahn exposing to the public the fact that the credit bureaus will report accounts to an authorized user's credit file. This caused panic in the credit bureaus because they didn't want people to know and they definately don't like the idea of a service that provides authorized user accounts for a fee because they feel that it is unfairly inflating someone's credit score. So, in an effort to stop the practice, The FICO company threatened to use a "new" scoring model called "FICO 08" that would no longer consider authorized user accounts in the scoring calculation. THIS NEVER HAPPENED but we will discuss that later. There was a massive disinformation campaign all over the internet which really did make people think that authorized user accounts did not boost scores any longer. As a result, the scammers decided that this was a great way to market something new and different to sell and thought that they could use this "FICO 08" MYTH to market a totally fraudulent and illegal service called "Aged Primary Trade Lines". It worked for a long time. In fact if you look online you will still see people selling backdated accounts. The advertising warns people that because of the "new scoring system", the only way to boost your score now was to add primary accounts and BACKDATE them. That is exactly what they did. The problem was that it was very short lived and it cost consumers and brokers like me lots of money. How was this done? Very simply, companies that have the ability to report payment information to the credit bureaus (which is not easy to get) just violated their terms and reported FICTITIOUS information to people's credit reports. They would report that a person had a loan or line of credit that was opened several years ago and that the payments were being made on time ever since. They make up the amount, the balance, the date it was opened and just posted it. Sounds simple right? Well the problem is that like most dirt merchants on the internet, their greed overshadowed their common sense so they just kept abusing the process to make more money. Eventually, when the credit bureaus see this, they will want to AUDIT the company that is doing the reporting. They will want to come into the office, look at the actual applications, see identification, and see proof of all these so called "payments" that have been made. Since none of these things exist, the company doing the reporting quickly LOSES it's reporing ability and can no longer report payment information. It gets worse - not only do they lose the ability to report anymore, but ALL the accounts they ever posted FALL OFF the person's credit report. That is why when people paid for these "aged" primary accounts, they fell off in about a month causing severe customer complaints. Of course none of the providers of this service ever gave any money back. I speak to people all over the US who have lost thousands of dollars with this mistake. Further, some companies abused this process so much that some credit bureaus like TransUnion actually FROZE people's credit files to investigate the accounts. This is NOT A GOOD IDEA. AGED PRIMARY ACCOUNTS are illegal and fraudulent. If you come across anyone trying to sell them - stay away because it will not end well. You will be frustrated and you will lose your money.