I would imaging that you have seen the catchy freecreditreport.com commercials on TV. After feeling the need to check my credit history, I opted to check them out. Their site seemed simple and I figured, why not, it’s free right? Not quite.
You get a free Experian report when you sign up with them. But we all know that you really need copies of all three. Now you can go through the effort of contacting all three agencies and wait to get their cryptic reports back and try to figure out where you stand, or you can do something like what freecreditreport.com is doing. They charge $24.95 to order all three for you and display the reports in a easy to understand user interface online.
Sounds great, worked just like I thought it would. Until I tried to print it out. Error, error, and error. Finally I called customer service and told them about the printing issue. The rep told me that they had been having issues with it for weeks now. Weeks?!? Something that is a staple of web usability was down for weeks? Yikes. The rep offered me a free month to my trial membership seeing as how they were anticipating to have the issue resolved within another week. I decided to try and be patient.
Today, I went to go online and print my credit reports out, thinking “by now they have to have fixed the printing issue”. To my surprise, I could not access the credit reports that I had purchased. After digging through the site I found out that the credit reports that you purchased are only available through their system for 30 days. 30 DAYS?!?! How is that helpful.
Annoyed, I called their customer service again. I explained my frustration and explained that I wanted to cancel my membership for obvious reasons. I further explained that I was not sure why they would have such a policy in place as it seems to be a huge usability flaw in their system/membership. If I pay for a credit report through the agencies, I get a hard copy that I get to keep, it never vanishes. Users will want to be able to review their report that they have paid for regardless of how much time has passed. If I were to order another copy 6 months down the road, I would want to compare the two to see what changes have happened. It isn’t that hard to save that information in a database and still be able to retrieve it at a later date, I know this being a web developer.
After explaining my reasons to customer service rep for why I was canceling, she offered me a 50% discount on my continued membership. What good is a membership that still won’t fulfill my needs (reviewing a paid for copy of my report)? Thanks, but no thanks.
If you are considering using freecreditreport.com, understand what you are getting into and be aware of when things that you rightfully bought will be yanked from out under you.
thanks for the info. that sucks
by law you can receive a free copy of your credit report every year with none of the membership requirements of that “free” site. Just got to https://www.annualcreditreport.com. It was set up by the FTC and the credit bureaus to get your actual free copies.
Yeah, I knew about getting them for free, but when I ordered them last year, I couldn’t understand what I got. It was really frustrating. That was why I had considered the online option. It was nice while it was available as it lined the three reports side by side for reference.
Does the https://www.annualcreditreport.com/ do a comparative analysis or does it just snail mail the three reports?
They take you one by one to each bureau’s sites where you can print out each of your credit reports for free. I’ve done it for the past 3 years and haven’t had any issues. There is a mail option I believe, but I’ve never used it so I’m not sure what the process is on it.