The Dangers of Free Credit Reports
You’ve probably been bombarded with offers to see your credit report and score online for free or a small fee. While reviewing ones credit report is important the best way to get it is directly from the reporting agencies themselves.
An important thing to remember about these offers is that the score they give you is not your actualy FICO score. It’s an approximation commonly known as “FAKO” scores. Unless you are getting the scores from myfico.com you must assume that you are not getting the rel score. Although there are a couple other places to get modified “real” scores. For example Providian (now wamu) customers get to see there PFICO when they log into their accounts. This is just a FICO score provided by TransUnion and weighted more heavily onrevolving accounts.
But besides the lack of real scores what causes most people problems is that the free reports aren’t really so free. In general they force you to sign up for credit monitoring service. Essential this emails you whenever a change has been made to your file. I have had several of these services in the past and have found them completely worthless. They tend to be very inaccurate and miss major changes or constatly alert you when nothing has happened. The best way to monitor your credit report is to sign up for an account with TrueCredit.com and keep an eye on it yourself.