Washingtonpost.com Launches Two Home Pages -- Just Two?

Fake Credit Report Sites Just As Scammy As The Real Ones

from the nothing-like-a-little-competition dept

Fri, Jul 15th 2005 12:27am — Mike Masnick

The whole point of forcing credit agencies to give you a free credit report was to help people avoid identity theft scams. However, it seems to have opened up entire new possibilities for scams. First, of course, there are the real credit agencies themselves, who we've noted use the "free" credit report offering to try to convince you you have to pay. This is no surprise, given what they've said about how free credit reports are un-American. Still, it looks like the credit reporting companies have some competition in their attempts to use credit reports to separate you from your money. Scammers have jumped onto the free credit report train and have built at least 100 fake "free credit report" sites designed to trick users into giving out all sorts of info, so that they can steal identities. Some are slightly (only slightly) less nefarious, in that they do point users to real credit reporting agencies, but on a pay-per-click basis -- and they're not pointing you to the one real site that handles free credit reports (AnnualCreditReport.com). Is it really any wonder that people don't trust the credit agencies?

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Block Sheep, 16 Jul 2005 @ 12:25pm

.gov, anyone?
to make matters worse, it's AnnualCreditReport.com ... not AnnualCreditReport.gov, which would make far more sense if you wanted the site to stand out as legitimate
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Tired, 2 Jun 2006 @ 8:37am

Have any of you tried to get to the annualcreditreport.com site! It doesn't exist!

Every time I try to go there, I get an error that the site doesn't exist.

What's up with that!
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wbambeck, 12 Feb 2008 @ 8:10am

.gov
Annualcreditreport.gov used to exist. I know. I used it a couple years ago. Found out Equifax had a whole lot of late-pay loans listed under my name, plus an "alias" and an "alternate" address. Turned out the alias belonged to another guy, and his SS # was one digit different from mine. Good thing he was an honest guy; he had a lot of loans, though. The local police helped track this down for me, and the other guy called me.

Can't find annualcreditreport.gov now, though.

I think there's a law that each agency has to give you a free report once per year upon request, so I'll try to contact them each separately. Please pray for me. They don't like to do it.

May God bless you.
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