Scamville? Not Exactly.

Interesting bit of history.

In the US there are four major consumer credit bureaus (Experian,Equifax,TransUnion,Innovis). The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 included a proposed rule change to require credit bureaus to offer a free credit report, once per year, to anyone who asked.

Experian fought this proposal tooth and nail. They lost.

So they rolled out freecreditreport.com, with it's scammy operations and unavoidable advertisement.

I guess if you can't beat 'em, then carpet-bomb the market with ads to confuse people, seed Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt into the whole idea of 'free' credit reports and make a few bucks on the side. (The other bureaus quickly followed suit with their own operations)

On the plus side, these scam-tactics are specifically addressed (somewhat) in the Credit Card Act of 2009.

I used FCR once years ago and found no problem with it. The credit report was free, and it was pretty clear that getting it enrolled you in a free trial of some credit monitoring service that was fairly easy to cancel, which I did immediately. I'm not one of those people who sends every Terms of Use I come across to my lawyer, but I definitely found it clearly worded enough that I didn't get hit with a single bill.

I did not know about the FTC thing. Perhaps they hid it better after I used it. It currently says, in perfectly legible text on their homepage:

"IMPORTANT INFORMATION

When you order your free report here, you will begin your free trial membership in Triple Advantage(SM). 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."

It's exactly this sort of thing that makes me leery of calling things scams. Having a free trial, or some free hook to get people into your service legitimately is not a scam. But there are enough stupid people out there who will sign up accidentally that they often get labeled as such.'

Nonetheless that wasn't even the point of that small segment of the article, which is that Arrington overestimates by an order of magnitude how much money is coming from "scams".