I’m sure both readers of this blog(including me) know this but I just wanted to write about a couple issues on the topic of sites that claim to give you a free credit report(or free credit score). I see these blasted all over TV all the time, well at least on CNBC and CNN where I watch a lot of stuff(no I’m not an investor I just find the news entertaining, long story ask me later).
Anyway my first question revolves around the sites being advertised, just a few minutes ago I saw an ad for the site freescore.com. Throughout the ad they talk about freescore.com but in the lower left of the ad they show the site freescore11.com. What’s with the 11 in the name? Why aren’t they consistent with the name? Top right of the screen is freescore.com in fancy letters.
I’ve seen the same sort of thing with ads for the site freetriplescore.com they too have added numbers to their domain name in the ads while the actors in the ads never mention the numbers, what’s with the numbers?
But the scam comes in to play when you find out(hopefully not before you get the credit report) that you only get that free info if you sign up for a service(in both cases). They do disclose this in the fine print on the ads, and I think on the freetriplescore ad one of the actors even mentions it in a somewhat sly(to me at least) way. But their marketing really drives home the fact that you can get this info for free from them when you cannot.
I think it’s likely many people don’t notice that actor saying they need to sign up for a service, and probably don’t have a DVR so they can pause and read the fine print(assuming the quality is good enough to read, I’ve seen a lot of fine print on TV that is really hard to read when paused.) And it’s these fine print and sly disclosure tricks that make me classify these sites as scams.
I recall a law being passed barring car dealers from using fine print in their TV advertising, I think that should be extended, they should set some sort of standard size of TV and say you can’t have text that is smaller than X inches or something.
Last point is there is a place where you can get a free credit report(once per year from each of the major credit reporters), I just looked it up again because they don’t advertise as far as I can tell(since they don’t make money on it they probably don’t have the funds to which is understandable), and I hardly ever hear them mentioned. I think this is the right site it is annualcreditreport.com.
You are also of course entitled to receive a copy of a credit report that someone else ran on you say you applied for an apartment or a loan or something, you can write directly to the credit agencies to get a copy of that report. There are probably other times you can get it too, I just remember being told this, and I did it one time about 9 years ago, there was some doctor’s office that had something on my credit report that I don’t recall having to pay, the doctor was based out of a state I’ve never been to before, I wrote them asking for more details on why they think I should pay them and a few months later they wrote back saying they removed that item from my report without any explanation, I guess it was a mistake on their end to begin with.
As a Providian..I mean Washington Mutual..I mean now Chase bank customer I did like (note past tense) the ability to check my credit score on their web site for free, never had to request it they just gave it to me and the history over the past 6 months or so. Since Chase acquired them though that feature is gone, oh well. That really was a unique feature among banks that I had relationships with that kept me there.
I’m also a customer with BofA, and the somewhat unique feature I like with them is the ability to generate temporary credit card numbers, I use that feature extensively, whenever possible really. I’m sure lots of banks offer both of these features, but it’s not something I was looking for when I signed up for them at the time(many many years ago), and I think both are nice things to have. I should get more for the ~24% interest rates I pay(I don’t mind higher interest rates I see it as incentive to pay it off sooner).