Why do free credit report companies ask for credit card information?
August 29th, 2010
I would like to see my free once a year credit report and now they want to know my credit card info. Why do they want to do that now? I don’t want to get caught up in paying money for the information.
annualcreditreport.com is the real free site to check your credit file for free once a year without a credit card.
https://www.annualcreditreport.com/ – NOT freecreditreport.com -
To see the “free once a year credit report”, you must go to http://www.annualcreditreport.com and not to any “free credit report companies”. The “free credit report companies” ask for credit card information because they charge you for something and do not give you the “free once a year credit report”. The website http://www.annualcreditreport.com will not ask you for your credit card information if you request only the free credit report (it will ask for credit card information if you instead ask for your score, which is not free). If you are asked for a credit card number, then you are ordering a credit score or something else expensive, not “the free once a year credit report”.
If they ask for your credit card, the credit report ain’t free. You are signing up for monitoring services and will be charged a monthly fee if you don’t cancel within the time limit.
Go to AnnualCreditReport.com. This is the site mandated by the FTC to allow online access to your free annual credit reports from each of the three credit bureaus. You won’t be asked for your credit card. The reports are free; scores are not.
CreditKarma.com and Quizzle.com both offer free score estimators. They aren’t FICO but sorta like FICO, give or take 50 points or so. Good enough if you are just curious about your score.