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My credit card was compromised, and the only reason I had the credit card was to improve my credit score.

I chose to close the account (since someone was able to use it), but I forgot how consequential it would be to my credit score. Is there something that I could do or should have done to help my credit score from making a big drop?

Update:

What happened is that they closed the account so that they can reissue me another card.

Plus the old card did not reached its first year since it was first issued.

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I once had a similar thing happen when I had a credit card compromised. Instead of issuing a new card number, the bank chose to mark the card as closed, and reopen a "new" account for me. In my case, the only piece of my score affected was the average age of my accounts. I tried to get them to fix this by somehow marking those two accounts as one, but they would not.

In your case, I suspect the drop in your score is because closing that card changed your utilization ratio by reducing your total available credit. There are two quick ways to fix this:

  1. Call the issuer of the cancelled card and see if instead of cancelling, they can reissue you another card. They may just open you another account like in my anecdote above, either way you can probably avoid a hard pull by going through them.

  2. Open another credit card to raise your available credit and lower you utilization ratio. You'll have to take the hit of the hard pull unless you have an existing relationship with another credit provider.

As always, there are many helpful tools that can help you decide which actions to take by simulating the affect they would have on your score. cough.. credit karma

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  • What happened is that they closed the account so that they can reissue me with another card. Plus the old card did not reached its first year since it was first issued. As for your advice, I may try to do the first one and see what they can do to triage this hit. If not, I was almost debating doing another card just to get more in my credit score "portfolio".
    – Jeremy Trpka
    Jan 21, 2019 at 16:45
  • Ah yes, so exactly what happened to me. Personally I wouldn't worry to much about it. It sounds like your credit history is relatively new and the best thing you can do is to continue being a responsible credit user. Time is the only thing that will make that average age older! Also, I think that opening another card like you describe isn't a bad idea either. Since you already have a "new" account with no history, why not make it two? I generally like to open / close credit cards 2 at a time, but to each his own.
    – Helpful Friend
    Jan 21, 2019 at 17:13
  • Took a look at Credit Karma, and I regained all of my lost credit score. Thank you again for the comment, @HelpfulFriend.
    – Jeremy Trpka
    Jan 25, 2019 at 14:15

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