FreeCreditReport.com Not As Free As Advertised
I don't normally check the details of my bank account unless I notice the balance is way off what it should be, but a combination of being overly tired but not wanted to sleep lead me to do just that. The second most recent item was a $14.95 charge that seemed dubious. They always are when there is an 800 number after them.
Contacting the number, I discovered it to be a charge from FreeCreditReport.com. You know, those guys that claim to give you free credit reports and monitoring. For free.
A few months ago, out of morbid curiosity, I felt compelled to see what my credit rating really was and signed up. When you sign up, they make you enter some personal information in order to see it, including social security and credit card info. They state that this is purely to verify your identity.
The line is that when you sign up, you get a seven day free trial. The hook though is that unless you explicitly call in to cancel your membership, they enroll automagically to their service for $14.95 a month. Seems a pretty penny to spend each month just to view your credit report. Unless you're paranoid of identity theft or love to spend $14.95 a month, once you view your credit score I can't see any reason to need to check up on it so often that would require a monthly subscription.
I think this sort of behavior by a company is just as bad as all those guys in Nigeria that try to get you to send them money. They're tricking consumers into paying for a service they don't want and in most cases don't need. After my trial expired, there was no notification that I was a full member... no email saying welcome, no receipts saying I had been billed for a month of service. Just a simple line in my bank account taking my hard earned cash. Any legit company would give you a receipt when you signed up for service. FreeCreditReport.com didn't want me to know so that they could keep billing me for all eternity.
Needless to say, this lead to an angry phone call today. The customer service representative I spoke to kept speaking of a their "non-refund policy" and then kept talking up the very services I wanted to be refunded for. There was a definite sense that she'd fielded this very type of phone call before. It was only after I accused their company of "making money by tricking consumers" did she offer to refund this month's charge (apparently there were more prior to this that I didn't see on my bank account).
And so the lesson to be learned is, if someone takes your money, accuse them of shady business practices and they'll give you a refund. Oh... and read the fine print whenever you sign up for anything claiming to be free (especially if you are forced to enter credit card information) and make sure to pay attention to charges to your bank account too.
As a side note, if you really want a free credit report, you can get one once a year from the Federal Government right here.
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