Let’s get this straight right off the bat: There’s no such thing as a free . . . credit score.
You can get a free credit report once a year from each of the three major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, TransUnion and Experian) by visiting www.annualcreditreport.com. The annualcreditreport.com site allows the credit bureaus to meet their government mandated obligation to disclose credit records to debtors and provides the most information you are going to get for free. Even annualcreditreport.com links to sites managed by the credit bureaus and they each try to trick you into buying credit “management” services while you are getting your annual free report.
Again, this is a free credit report. They are under no obligation to disclose your credit scores. Scores are only provided by the credit bureaus and only for a fee so for someone to give you a free credit score they would have to pay the fee for you.
Not likely.
In spite of this, the email message we’re focusing on today says “Get Your Free Credit Scores From All 3 Bureaus Now!”. So we have to wonder how they afford to give away free credit scores?
The answer is quite simple. They don’t.
Here’s a copy of the message:
Technically, this may not be fraud but it is pretty sneaky. It’s a classic example of the “bait and switch” sales technique. If you click on any of the tracking links in the message you are taken to a site offering “Free Credit Scores From All 3 Bureaus” in exchange for your first name, last name, email address and zip code. There’s also a checkbox that’s labeled: I am interested in receiving special offers and discounts from Credit Diagnosis and Your Savings Club partners.
If you submit the information above you get a second screen that asks you to add your address info. Then when you click the “View Scores” button you get “Sorry. The offer is not available in your area. We’ll redirect to a different offer.” (This is paraphrased. It only did this once and we didn’t write down exactly what it said.) The “new offer” requires you to hand over credit card information and sign up for a “free trial” if you want to view your scores.
We declined to go any further so we don’t know exactly how you go about getting rid of the “free trial” once you get your scores but we doubt that they make it easy to get out of the contract. Even if they don’t make you jump through flaming hoops to get your money back, your credit scores are still not free:
- You had to do the work of filling in the forms and declining the services offered in the free trial. (This is probably harder than it sounds.)
- You provided them with information about yourself that they can sell. And not just your name, address and email address. You also told them that you are interested in credit services and that you are gullible enough to fall for a bait and switch. This is valuable information.
All of this is more or less the same tactic as freecreditreport.com uses. You’ll probably know these guys by their annoying singing ads. They’re not free either.
- -
OnlyMyEmail is an award winning hosted spam filtering service and business email hosting provider. Our enterprise cloud computing anti-spam solution, the MX-Defender, has the highest capture rate of any spam filter ever tested in the VBSpam Challenge, blocking a record setting 99.9993% of all malicious and junk email.
Our Personal spam filtering system is also a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and has won both the PC World "World Class Award" and also the PC Magazine "Editor's Choice Award."
OME-Kids is a webmail solution that protects children from spam and other harmful emails. OME-Kids offers unique Parental Controls that allow you to choose the level of security and oversight that's right for your child.
Related posts:
Tags: bait and switch, fraud, scam
