Extra, Extra, Read all about it! Shouts out from this infograph to let the consumer know just who is who in the credit report market. It seems that if one is not careful the first step in credit awareness and credit repair could be a misstep.
The Federal Trade Commission has reported that AnnualCreditReport.com is the only authorized website for the consumer to get their free annual report. The Fair and Accurate Credt Transactions Act of 2003 (FACTAct) guarantees every consumer one free credit report each year and most of the sites offering some kind of free report are not actually authorized by the FTC, according to FTC.gov.
The infograph lists 24 websites that offer free credit reports that were analyzed by Consumer Reports. It was found that nine were owned by or closely associated with Transunion. Eight shared the same type of relationship with Experian. Four sites were unaffiliated and the final group was affiliated with another company.
There was 320 uses of the word free that did not necessarily pan out to be free. There was often something attached that was not free.
The World Privacy Forum found over 200 Web domains that ?resembled the official AnnualCreditReport.com site. There are so many that are close to the real site it would cause consumer confusion.
There were 312 uses of the word free across the 24 site homepages.
This is little known information that should be blasted everywhere. The old school newspaper feel is a nice concept, but in this case there is too much information in one place. Consumers are not likely to stand in one place and look at this long enough for it to sink in. MoneyCentral.msn.com, FTC.gov, and ConsumerWebWatch.org have presented necessary information, but the information is all squeezed into a lot of words and not enough graphic. Read up on more articles like this on our home page and also find out about the top credit repair companies that might be able to help you fix your credit scores.
