Credit/Debt Recovery

BBB report on freecreditreport.com

Let me back up my assertion about freecreditreport.com

Check out the Better Business Bureau's reliability report on them. 

I think I've blogged a warning about freecreditreport.com before, but I guess Experian is marketing it as a way to get your free credit report without waiting for FACTA to kick in where you live.

Don't fall for it. If you live out west, you can order it free under FACTA. If you live elsewhere and can't wait until it rolls out in your region, try myFICO.com. No scams, no subscriptions that are a pain to cancel.

There's no reason to ever use freecreditreport.com.

annualcreditreport.com linking shenanigans

I hope by now everyone grasps the FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) and what it means to you.

One of the provisions mandated by Congress in the FCRA is that the credit bureaus had to set up a web site where consumers could request their free annual credit report.

The site they set up was www.annualcreditreport.com. 

But the bureaus, citing almost certainly bogus "security" concerns, aren't allowing third-party linking to the site. To get there, one must type the url into the browser. The only direct links that are supposed to work are from the three credit bureaus' official sites (and they aren't making the annualcreditreport.com link obvious, by any means) and from the FTC site.

The folks at EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) have teamed up with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse to request that this stupid linking policy be reversed.

More power to them. This seems like an obvious attempt by the credit bureaus to make it harder for consumers to find the annualcreditreport.com site, and prop up sales of their unnecessary "credit monitoring service" subscriptions and rip-off schemes like freecreditreport.com.

UPDATE: Apparently, EPIC and PRC have won this one... AnnualCreditReport.com now allows direct links!!

Radio Interview

I just got off the phone with Beta Wayne of CINQ Radio in Montreal, Quebec. GREAT interview. He'd actually read a lot of the book before he called, and his questions were very well informed.

We recorded the interview, so I don't know when it will air; I'll post the date and time if I can.

Have you tried www.annualcreditreport.com yet?   Springboard has, and here are the grades they give:

www.annualcreditreport.com website:   Grade:  C.  nice graphic design, although the SSN tabs didn’t work properly. You have to put in several items of personal information and then choose which bureau you want the free report from, and then go through that bureau’s authentification routines.  The toll free number should be on the front page along with the address.  I’ll say in advance I was unable to get TWO out of the THREE bureau credit report using this portal.   They make you check a box to request masking the digits of your Social Security Number - I think our SSN's should always be masked.  They make you snail mail suggestions & complaints.  Didn’t want to pay extra for credit scores so I haven’t tested that yet. I still like the MyFico.com product, which, at a cost of $12.95, includes the Equifax report and their nifty “Score Report” telling you your score, of course, and what impacted it.  Fair Isaac did a good job with this.  

TransUnion  -  Grade:  Flunk.   Okay, so this was the first one I tried and so my expectations for user friendliness were still high.   Went through all the identification fields and got stymied somehow and received an error message that said only that they were unable to provide it over the internet.    Wasn’t this the whole point?   Really Annoying Feature:  TU has an automatic opt-in for their spam (actually they called it “credit education tips” and marketing something or other).  Who needs that?  No link for contacting them that I saw. On to the next one.

Experian:   Grade: A. Authentification made sense and pulling the report went very smoothly and the Experian interface was excellent. No annoying opt in for their spam. Suggestion to Experian - can you condense the reports somehow so that home printers don’t burn up printing so many pages?  They actually invite you to contact them.  

Equifax:   Grade: C+.   A good feature is that they repopulated the data fields from the main site, but have an automatic opt out for masking the first part of an SSN (meaning automatically "no", I don't want to).  It should be an automatic opt in, "yes, I want to mask my SSN, for safety’s sake.  I was again “unable to access my credit report” without an explanation why.  They give you a PDF for you to download and MAIL. Not even the toll free phone number, which I’ll discuss next.  

Toll Free Number 877-322-8228:   Grade:   None...yet.  I figured I would get stymied with a "you've already tried to access your report" message since I'd already been to the website.  Use this number to request your credit reports by phone. You will go through a simple verification process over the phone.   They want your home phone number to “verify” their other data.   Your reports will be mailed to you.   The phone message tells you to visit the website, which I’d already done, and found out that I'd not been able to receive 2 of my 3 credit reports.  

FACTA rolls out in the midwestern states on March 1st, so maybe the kinks will be worked out by then.  I'll be trying the site some more on other people and will report on results.