Personal Tradelines provides tradelines to prospective customers who want to improve their credit scores by “piggybacking” on the good credit of long-held or “seasoned” credit lines. According to the Better Business Bureau, the company appears to have offices both in Denver, Colorado and in Long Beach, California, and it is associated with a company called IWCN, Llc.

Personal Tradelines is a bare-bones operation. The PT website has very little information about their business and no educational material to help people determine if getting a tradeline is a good move for them in the first place. This lack of information also makes it unclear how much expertise — if any — Personal Tradelines has on their team to advise clients.

Though they were responsive to requests for information over the phone, the website does not have a chatbot function, and it doesn’t have much in the way of data on the site. The page that lists available tradelines and prices is well laid out and informative. Other than that, the site is at the back of the pack in terms of customer-friendly knowledge.

The range of rates offered for tradelines by Personal Tradelines is big — huge even — between $175 and $2,340 when we checked. Though a range of prices is good for consumers with different amounts of money to spend for different, clearly different products, in all likelihood the range of Personal Tradelines prices is due to the fact that the inexpensive tradelines are poor quality.

The Better Business Bureau initiated an investigation of IWCN LLC, the parent company of Personal Tradelines, on August 26, 2019. According to the BBB, on “September 27, 2019 the Department of Justice (DoJ) declined to register this firm or others offering similar products or services. For justification, DoJ directed BBB’s attention to Civil Code 1789.13(d) which states: ‘A credit services organization and its salespersons, agents, representatives, and independent contractors who sell or attempt to sell the services of a credit services organization shall not do any of the following: Make, or counsel or advise a buyer to make, a statement that is untrue or misleading and that is known, or that by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, to a consumer credit reporting agency or to a person who has extended credit to a buyer or to whom a buyer is applying for an extension of credit, such as statements concerning a buyer’s identification, home address, creditworthiness, credit standing, or credit capacity.’”

Personal Tradelines does have a 60-day money-back guarantee if tradelines don’t post to your score, and 35% of its inventory includes like over $20,000. As a first step to improving credit, Personal Tradelines may be right for people who don’t need a lot of hand-holding and have a range of money to spend.