Any “Free” Offer Requiring A Credit Card Is Not Really Free

One of the latest “scams” going is hawking consumers access to their credit reports for “free”, of which freecreditreport.com is probably the most famous.  What they don’t tell you is that in order to gain access to these “free” reports, you have to give them your credit card number.  Now why on earth would they need a credit card?  Simple!  In order to sign you up for a free trial subscription to a monthly credit-monitoring service.  If you either forget to cancel before the trial is up or, worse yet, neglect to read the fine print to begin with, your card will be charged a monthly fee.  I put “scam” in parentheses because if you read the fine print, the trial subscription is disclosed.  It’s not outright theft, but it is a sneaky way to do business.

No legitimately free product is going to require you to provide a credit card number to sign up.  At best, you’ll end up with a free trial subscription you’re going to have to remember to cancel later.  That’s fine if the value of what you’re getting is worth the hassle of having to keep track of everything you’ve signed up for.  But it’s easy to forget, and that’s what they’re banking on.

A Little Research Goes A Long Way

Usually, a little research goes a long way towards helping you avoid wasting money on misleading “free” products and services.  At the very least, you should go in with your eyes open.

• Read The Fine Print – The freecreditreport.com site clearly discloses the trial subscription and what will happen if you don’t cancel in the fine print.  Read it.
• Google The Company/Offer In Question – If you google “free credit report,” you’ll discover there is already an official government-sanctioned website where you can get one free annual credit report from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus.  Instead of paying freecreditreport.com $14.95 every month to monitor your credit, you could achieve the same result by pulling one of your free annual reports every 4 months to make sure nothing fishy was going on.  If you wanted to know your actual credit score in addition to the contents of your reports (a good idea if you’re thinking of borrowing money in the near future), you could pay a one-time fee of $15.95 to get a copy of your FICO® Score from MyFico.com, which is a much better deal than a $14.95 monthly fee which basically amounts to the same thing.  A quick 30 minutes spent doing research  would have saved you several hundred dollars per year, in this case.
• Google “[Company Name] Scam” – If it’s truly a scam, you can bet googling “[company name] scam” will bring up dozens if not hundreds of results.  Read a few of the complaints and take them into consideration before taking the plunge.

Remember, if a company wants to give you something for free, they don’t need your credit card.  If they ask for one, something is up.  It’s up to you to figure out what.