12.31.08

FreeCreditReport.com scam

Posted in personal, web at 7:16 pm by danvk

I was looking over my checking account transactions for the past year and saw a mysterious $12.95 charge from “CIC*Triple Advantage 877-48168″ appearing once a month. A search quickly showed that I’d been had by FreeCreditReport.com.

Turns out I’d used this site to get a credit check when I moved in to my old apartment last August. Everyone is entitled to one free credit check per year, and I thought that this was what I was getting. I’d failed to notice the fine print on their main page (helpfully displayed in blue-on-blue text):

When you order your free report here, you will begin your free trial membership in Triple AdvantageSM Credit Monitoring. If you don’t cancel your membership within the 7-day trial period†, you will be billed $14.95 for each month that you continue your membership.
ConsumerInfo.com, Inc. and Freecreditreport.com are not affiliated with the annual free credit report program. Under a new Federal law, you have the right to receive a free copy of your credit report once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies. To request your free annual report under that law, you must go to www.annualcreditreport.com.

That’s right, they sign you up for a free trial of a monthly service which you must opt-out of after 30 days. They do their best not to tell you that they’ve signed you up.

Looking back in my checking account, I found 16 months * $12.95/month = $207.20 in charges. Thanks to help from this discussion, I was eventually able to get this refunded in its entirety. Read more for details.

Apparently freecreditreport.com is a well-known scam. The page I linked to above on knowzy summarizes many users’ experiences trying to get refunds from their custom support people. The main takeaways were:

1. Don’t be angry at the representative.
2. Do everything on the phone. They will ignore all email and snail mail.
3. Don’t believe them if they say “no refunds”. Their supervisors can give refunds.
4. If nothing works, threaten to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau or your bank.

Here was my experience:
I called their 800 number and was asked for my credit card number, so that they could look up my account. After being assured that they weren’t going to charge it, I gave it to them. The representative explained what TripleAdvantage was. He offered to cancel my account and refund me for one month’s charges ($12.95). I asked whether they could refund more than that. He said that he couldn’t, but I could send a letter to them asking for a full refund. I asked if his supervisor could give me a full refund, and he put me on hold.

I waited on hold for about ten minutes. The representative came back on the line once or twice to check that I still wanted to wait. After ten minutes or so, the call dropped. It’s possible this was just bad reception on my cell phone, but I doubt it.

I called back and got a different representative, who asked for my full SSN. I gave her my credit card number instead, since I’d already given them that. I explained the situation and she said that she’d “seen something the other representative should have noticed.” She’d go talk to her manager. Two minutes later, she came back and said that, because they had never sent me my security PIN, they would refund me the full $207.20 that they’d billed me over the last 16 months.

The credit hasn’t showed up in my account yet, so this isn’t over yet. But so far it’s turned out a lot better than I’d expected.

Personal takeaways for me:

1. I should read over my bank statement more than once a year.
2. I shouldn’t have ignored the emails that freecreditreport.com sent me once a month. I’d assumed they were spam and ignored them.
3. Next time I need a credit report, I’ll go to annualcreditreport.com, which is actually free.

I’m happy to see that annualcreditreport.com is the top result for the search [free credit report]. On the downside, freecreditreport.com has an ad that shows up above it.

Update I just received three deposits from “CIC*Triple+Advantage”, one for 2007, one for 2008 and one for the last month. I’m in the clear!

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