Credit bureaus Colorado

The mortgage company, it turned out, judged Temple, 33, differently. It looked at her FICO score, the assessment widely used by lenders, based on a formula supplied by Fair Isaac. Temple's FICO score was nearly 100 points lower than her TransRisk score. "Needless to say, we had to back out of our contract," she credit bureaus Colorado says. Temple didn't know that TransUnion and the other bureaus are credit bureaus Colorado trying to wrest control of the credit-scoring market from Fair Isaac. She had credit bureaus Colorado no way of knowing the competing scores differed. Confusion awaits any consumer who dares tread online in search of credit bureaus Colorado a credit score, personal finance experts credit bureaus Colorado say. "It's one of the biggest rip-offs you can find," says credit consultant John Ulzheimer, author of You're Nothing But A Number: Why Achieving Great Credit Scores Should Be On Your List of Wealth Building Strategies. Consumers are also getting tricked into paying for basic credit reports before obtaining the ones they can get free, as mandated by the federal government in 2003.

The only place those free reports are available is at AnnualCreditReport.com, run jointly by the credit bureaus Colorado Big Three (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax (EFX)). Yet, dozens of websites affiliated with the bureaus falsely imply that they credit bureaus Colorado can also distribute the government-mandated free credit bureaus Colorado reports. get free credit report online

At FreeCreditReport.com, ConsumerInfo.com, PrivacyMatters.credit bureaus Colorado com, Free3BureauCreditReport.com and other similarly named websites, free trial offers and package deals abound. The most ubiquitous: pitches for free credit reports and free credit scores if you subscribe to a "credit monitoring" service that alerts credit bureaus Colorado you each time a lender checks credit bureaus Colorado your credit history, says Robert Mayer, a University of Utah professor who has analyzed two dozen such sites for credit bureaus Colorado Consumer Reports WebWatch. "The word 'free' is used so freely that it really has no meaning in the context of these types of sites," Mayer says. The profusion of websites hawking credit reports, credit scores and credit monitoring to consumers have one thing in common: They all sell data supplied by the Big Three. free credit report and The bureaus are the drivers behind a blizzard of consumer promotions for credit reports (a credit bureaus Colorado record of how you pay your bills); credit scores (a calculation of your creditworthiness, based on your credit report); and credit monitoring (a monthly subscription credit bureaus Colorado service, which credit experts say is of marginal value). Thanks to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, each bureau must supply every consumer with one free credit report a year. But while meeting the minimum requirements of this federal mandate, the Big Three have been energetically tapping online shoppers for hundreds of millions of dollars of fresh revenue and profit. By selling credit data via websites credit bureaus Colorado that use "free credit report" and "free credit score" as inducements to sign up for credit monitoring, which has become a cash cow. No surprise that the vast matrix of websites pitching credit data to consumers engenders befuddlement. Even industry insiders say it's all too easy for consumers to get flummoxed. "There should be more education about what you receive and how to navigate the various sources of information," says Mark Catone, senior vice president of First American Credco, which processes credit reports. Experian, for instance, sells credit bureaus Colorado to consumers at Experian.com and credit bureaus Colorado at six other sites. fair credit report Experian spokesman Don Girard says that selling to consumers at websites using different names "is credit bureaus Colorado just creative marketing." TransUnion, privately owned by the billionaire Pritzker family of Chicago, operates TrueCredit.com, the site where Wendy Temple bought her TransRisk credit score, as a wholly owned subsidiary. Another major subsidiary, TransUnion Interactive, distributes consumer products via dozens of independently run websites, company spokesman Steve Katz says.

These include PrivacyMatters.com, free-credit-reports.com, Credit.com, Free3BureauCreditReport.com, FreeCreditReportsInstantly.com, speedycreditreports.com and SpendonLife.com, Katz says.