credit inquiries from certain credit card issuers (amex and chase especially) will accrue exclusively to experian and not the others based on your state, which can lead to situations where you might have 12 inquiries (and therefore a lower score) with experian while looking great on creditkarma's fako score from transunion because your applications resulted in 0 inquiries with transunion. if you live in a state where citi pulls equifax, the bureaus actually pulled by different issuers may partially explain some of the score differentials. those trying to manage the balance of credit inquiries across the big 3 for the two years they appear on their reports can mitigate these effects in a few different ways... check creditboards.com for more information