FREE as in FreeCreditReport.com (note my decision not to hyperlink to this website) actually means you will be charged $14.95 a month if you don’t cancel your trial account within 7 days. FREE means without charge, and this service is far from it.

You have probably seen the pop-culture commercials (Singing Pirates, Dream Girl, New Car, Bicycling) using catchy jingles to show what’s going to happen if you don’t get your free credit report today. Obtaining your credit report is important, but commercials cost money and FreeCreditReport.com wants to make more than its 70 million dollars invested in advertising to bring you to their website. According to an associate creative director at the Martin Agency, which has worked on the advertisements, “We knew our creative [sic] was good, and we were targeting a younger audience. That’s exactly what we received with that: we have a lot younger demographic coming into our site.”

There are over 70 homages to these commercials on YouTube and even a five-year old can be found singing along. Hopefully, he doesn’t have a credit card or credit report, but you never know.

The FreeCreditReport.com website is so sneaky that pressure from the Federal Trade commission and others have led FreeCreditReport.com to post a disclosure on its home page. The IMPORTANT INFORMATION bubble, which has been known to change location from time to time, reads:

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.

In fact, there is so much confusion about getting your credit report that the government-authorized AnnualCreditReport.com had to post the following on their website:

AnnualCreditReport.com is the official site to help consumers to obtain their free credit report. Please be aware of how you arrived at this site. To ensure that you are visiting the legitimate site, type https://www.annualcreditreport.com directly into the address bar on your browser...

Why should you avoid FreeCreditReport.com, TrueCredit.com, and other websites that charge you monthly for access to your report?

The three major credit bureaus including Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are required by law to offer reports through the authorized AnnualCreditReport.com for FREE. Yes, for FREE. Also, you can purchase a credit score when you request your free annual credit report through this website.

Rather than retrieve your reports from all three reporting agencies at the same time, you can rotate your requests so you can keep an eye on your credit report throughout the year. For example, in January, request your report from TransUnion; in May from Equifax; and then in September from Experian. If you sign up with FreeCreditReport, you are going to pay about $180 a year. Put that money in your savings account instead.

FreeCreditReport.com is just one of many credit report services trying to lure you in. I haven’t come across them yet, but I know that TrueCredit.com (note my decision not to hyperlink to this website), sponsored by TransUnion, has their own set of commercials as well.

Don’t know what to look for when you access your FREE credit report from AnnualCreditReport.com? Read some tips here.