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Watch Out For Credit Reporting Sites That Offer Free Credit Reports

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Under the FCRA, you can get your free copies of your credit reports from each of the 3 major credit bureaus once every 12 months, if you ask.

You may choose to get your credit reports all at the same time, or get each of them at different times, if you want to. If you want to improve your credit scores significantly, you must take advantage of this law to the fullest because what are written on your credit reports are all factors that make your credit scores rise or fall. If there are negative and accurate information on your credit reports, you should take note of
them and do the steps to amend them. If you have negative but inaccurate information, on the other hand, you should dispute them so they will not affect you anymore.

The FCRA is a great law that is for the people, and yet, there are companies that mislead or misinform others about their rights and what they should do to stop these companies from taking advantage of them.

Firstly, if you like to get your free copies of your credit reports, there is only one website, one phone number and one mailing address you should use to do that. Now, you and only you should be the one to get your credit reports; no one from any of the credit bureaus will reach you by mail, phone, or email for personal information to get your credit reports. If you encounter such requests from anyone it is a scam. And besides, not only is it a scam, it is also harmful to your privacy as they might use your private information to send you spam or use up your credit card or bank funds.

If you are accessing your free credit reports online, the only website to go to is annualcreditreport.com. There are companies who have misspelled variations of that name, thinking that there will be people who will type the web address incorrectly, and when they do, they will be led to believe that the URL they incorrectly typed is the right one. But in reality they will only be led to buy that company’s products before
theycould access their free credit reports.

You must always remember that there is nothing you are obliged to purchase before having your free credit reports. Once you access annualcreditreport.com there are services offered by the major credit
bureaus. But you may choose not to buy because regardless of whether you buy or not does not affect your right to get your free credit reports.

There are credit report companies that claim to give you free copies of your credit reports when in truth, they require you to buy something first before anything else.

There are credit report companies who will give you free copies of your credit reports, when in reality, they will ask you to sign up with your name and email address first and charge you after a number of
days.

What they offer you is not really a free access to your credit reports. They are offering a free trial access in which, after expiration, they will charge you on your credit card for that service to continue. If
you encounter a website like that you must first read their terms of service to see if you are really getting a free service or a free trial offer. You must also read their privacy policy to see if they will send
you their and their partner companies promotional emails, something hard to get rid of.

You must be careful of credit report companies who claim to give you free copies of your credit reports when in truth, they give you the combined version of the 3 credit reports you have, or they will let you
see the partial part of one of your credit reports first before letting you see the rest, provided that you will pay them upfront.

Lastly, phishing scams are common today when credit repair is a huge market. In one way or another there will always be people who will be fooled by phishing scams or ads that ask for their personal data,
credit card numbers and bank account before their credit reports will be accessed. This type of scam works by clearing up the victims’ accounts, leaving with them the debts that are hard to repay. If you
see something like this, forward it to spam @ uce.gov, the FTC database of deceptive spam.

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We all need a little help when it comes to sorting out our debt.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2007 at 11:28 am and is filed under Credit Cards, Identity Theft, Credit Card Processing, Apply for a Credit Card, online credit card application, Blog Carnivals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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