Not much in life is free and neither is a credit report and score UNLESS you pay attention at the time you order the report. Freecreditreport.com needs operating revenue and to get it, they enroll you into CIC Triple Advantage Credit Monitoring at the time you order your credit report. This fact is clearly stated in print on their website when you order the report and despite the proclamations of all of you who have had to pay the monitoring fees, you knew, or should have known that you enrolled in this service when you got your credit report.
It is a "trial period" free for 30 days. BUT, you must cancel that service if you don't want to incur $12.95 monthly charges after 30 days and you must do it before the 30 day trial is up. They don't make it easy but it's also not that difficult to cancel either. You can use the service for a few days free (nothing much happens with the service) and since it's hooked up with Experian, one of the credit reporting services, you cancel thru the Experian company at 877-481-6826 by phone. You will get a prompt when you call and you enter a 1 (service cancellation) and then get a short wait for a customer service rep. When that person comes on, you have to give them enough info that they are assured that you are the person you claim to be (social security # and mother's maiden name), same stuff you had to give to get the credit report.
Once they are convinced that you are who you say you are, you can cancel this monitoring service via the phone call. Your confirmation of cancellation is not e-mailed. Ask for a confirmation over the phone. They will give you the name and I.D. Number of the CSR who you are dealing with as a confirmation. Then just to be sure that the service was cancelled, wait a day and call them again. If the new CSR that takes your second call says, "our records indicate that your monitoring service has already been cancelled", then you know that your first attempt was successful. If not, do it again. There are other options for getting a free credit report directly thru Experian, Equifax or TransUnion (credit denied, job change, etc). You don't go thru Freecreditreport.com to do those, you deal directly with the credit reporting bureau. Much info is available online advising you of when you are entitled to one of these free reports (no credit score is provided however). Hope this helps, and be careful, there are no free lunches in this business.
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