Costly "free" credit reports

Costly "free" credit reports are everywhere

Comment: Watch out for the pseudo & spurious "free" credit reports. There is one really free one (a featured link on this blog!) and here it is: www.annualcreditreport.com!

Excerpt:

After nearly a decade of bickering, Congress in 2003 finally granted every American the right to a free peek at their credit report each year. Now dozens of Web sites – many of them either owned by or affiliated with the major credit bureaus -- are hard at work tricking people into paying for that free report.

Search for "free credit report" on the Web and you will find pages and pages of Web sites offering free credit reports. All but one, however, charge for those “free” reports and place all sorts of conditions on purchases. One site, for instance, requires enrollment in pricey credit monitoring service, which can only be canceled online after precisely 23 days. Another automatically enrolls users in a discount travel service. And some hint that the real free credit report site established by Congress -- AnnualCreditReport.com -- isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Additional comments: Its a good thing to check one's credit on at least an annual basis. K and I use a pay service - www.myfico.com - that has quarterly reporting and fraud detection. Helpful How Stuff Works - Credit Report article!