Beware of freecreditreport.com. The commercials are cute and the diddies are very catchy, but they mask a very shady business practice that Experian should really be reprimanded for.
Freecreditreport.com IS NOT A SITE THAT SIMPLY GIVES YOU ONE FREE CREDIT REPORT. (For those interested, this is the correct site—you make want to actually type this in the address bar to avoid a potentially fake site:
Https://www.annualcreditreport.com
According to their home page, "AnnualCreditReport.com is the official site to help consumers to obtain their free credit report... You will never receive an email directly from the Annual Credit Report Request Service.").
The irony is that Experian, which for so many years seemed to have a reputation on par with TransUnion and Equifax, is actually a sponsor of the legit annualcreditreport.com site; yet the company continues to thoroughly sully its reputation in owning the freecreditreport.com company. Frankly, I think Equifax and TransUnion need to distance themselves from Experian. But on to the reasons:
Freecreditreport.com is actually a subscription service, a fact that is obscure on those snappy commercials and only made semi-obvious on it's home page (a strong improvement considering the home page was once as obscure as the commercials). You are enrolling in a "free trial" which supposedly lasts 7 days (was 30) before becoming a 14.95/mo service. The impression, naturally, is that if you cancel at any time the billing will stop.
It doesn't.
That was my problem when my two roommates and I signed up a couple years ago. Like most people, we had heard some rumor that you're entitled to a free credit report if you're ever turned down for credit, or if you live in a state that grants its residents one free credit report each year. So when you come across a website called freecreditreport.com, you reasonably assume that's what you're getting. When we saw that it was actually a subscription service we were a little surprised, but no biggie, you could cancel at any time. So we got our reports and then cancelled. And got charged. And we cancelled again. We got charged again. I called on behalf of all of us, talked to a live person, was assured that we had been cancelled and WOULD NOT BE BILLED ANYMORE AND... Were billed again. We each called individually, (getting old, huh?) each spoke to a live rep, got assurance, and you guessed it—it was very frustrating. After six months and about $200.00 I finally cancelled my credit card and renewed it.
If you want to be deceptive, that's not good. But oh well. But when you say "do this and i'll stop flogging" and it's done but you keep on flogging, well, that's just plain dishonesty. Add the cutesy and extremely proliferating advertising campaign just makes you an outright rapist. Funny how that ad campaign started around the time people were getting a little wise and the web page *disclaimer* had to be made more obvious.
Under the "Controversy" section of Wikipedia's Experian topic:
The Florida state attorney general is currently conducting a civil (not criminal) investigation of Experian for possible violations of Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.[12] Possible violations include misleading advertising, misleading domain name, failure to honor cancellations, and failure to disclose a negative option enrollment.
In Experian violated the Federal Trade Commission rules relating to the provision of free credit reports by mandating members provide credit card information before a request is fulfilled. The Federal Trade Commission's fraud unit received several complaints regarding this tactic and has now agreed a settlement with the company.
Wikipedia freecreditreport.com article In they were sued by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive marketing tactics. They settled for $950,000 in the form of free credit monitoring for those affected and agreed not to use deceptive and misleading claims about free offers and to offer full disclosure of terms and conditions of any free offers.
In other words,
Swim away!!!
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