Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Beware of Free Credit Report Offer from FreeCreditReport.com. Get it from AnnualCreditReport.com

Experian a well know credit reporting agency runs a website FreeCreditReport.com. The service offered by Experian on this website is a bit misleading. On this site it appears that a consumer can get his or her credit report without any charge. In order to do so, one has to give their credit card information. Experian then automatically signs that person up as a member for credit-monitoring service and starts to bill $14.95 per-month. It is up to the person to cancel this ‘automatic-membership enrolment’ by Experian within 7 days otherwise Experian starts to bill $14.95 per-month on the credit card information that they collected for the “free” credit report offer.

You may have seen their somewhat funny TV jingle in which a man sings about his poor credit and about the ‘free’ credit report from FreeCreditReport.com

Experian now also faces a class-action law suit that claims that their advertising is misleading and fraud.

In the past, Experian has settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by paying more than a million dollars in fines when they had a similar deceptive-advertising problem on one of their other website ConsumerInfo.com. Apparently the Better Business Bureau has thousands of complaints from consumers about FreeCreditReport.com.

Consumers are legally entitled to receive one free report annually from each of the consumer credit reporting agency. Commonly these credit agencies are known as credit-bureaus and they are Equifax, TransUnion and Experian.

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) runs a website AnnualCreditReport.com. This is the only affirmed site from where you can get a free credit report. So once in every 12 months visit AnnualCreditReport.com and get your free credit report.