What does your email address say about your creditworthiness?

Do Comcast users have better credit scores than AOL users? Maybe. Image: Titanas/Flickr/CC BY-SA

According to one website, your email address may say something about your ability to repay credit. One credit score website took a look at its clients by email server and found some surprising results. There does seem to be a correlation between Internet server and credit score.

Statistic based on one free credit score website

The advertising-subsidized website Credit Karma provides free credit scores for its clients. The site has a database of about 100,000 users. The site recently ran the numbers to determine the average credit scores based on user’s e-mail servers.

Results similar three years ago

The company did the same calculations about three years ago when the database had only about 20,000 users. The results were remarkably similar, indicating that there may be something to this after all.

The current data was requested by MSN’s Life, Inc.

The breakdown

According to the study, people using Comcast for their Internet provider have higher credit scores than those using Gmail. Going down the list from there is MSN, Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo!.

About credit scores

Credit scores range from 501 to 900. The higher the credit score, the easier it will be to borrow money. Credit scores are the main source lenders use to determined creditworthiness.

What does it all mean?

So what does this mean for the average consumer? Is somebody with a Comcast account really a lower risk than an AOL user? Maybe, maybe not. As the CreditKarma disclaimer says: “Our analysis is for informational purposes. The data shows correlations for a number of reasons and is based on averages. As anyone who has taken a statistics class knows, causality and correlation are very different.”

It does, however, perhaps hint that the way an Internet server is perceived may have some broad correlation with how a consumer is perceived by others on the web. Or, it might simply be a nod to the fact that people from different financial backgrounds access the internet and use email in different ways, thus encouraging them to use different service providers. Again, we wouldn’t recommend making any real-world money decisions based on this information.

Sources

CreditKarma
HardOCP
MSNBC

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