Credit expert Washington

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 credit expert Washington 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 says. Temple didn't know that TransUnion and the other bureaus are trying to wrest control of the credit-scoring market from Fair Isaac.

She had no way of knowing the competing scores differed. Confusion awaits any consumer who dares tread online in search of a credit score, personal finance experts say. "It's one of the biggest rip-offs you can find," credit expert Washington 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 credit expert Washington 2003. The only place those free reports are available is at AnnualCreditReport.com, run jointly by the Big Three (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax (EFX)). Yet, dozens of websites affiliated with the bureaus falsely imply that they can also distribute the government-mandated credit expert Washington free reports. check credit report free At FreeCreditReport.com, ConsumerInfo.com, PrivacyMatters.com, Free3BureauCreditReport.com and credit expert Washington other similarly named websites, free trial offers and package deals abound. The credit expert Washington most ubiquitous: pitches for free credit reports and free credit scores if you subscribe to a "credit monitoring" service that alerts you each time a lender checks your credit history, says Robert Mayer, a University credit expert Washington of Utah professor who has analyzed two dozen such sites for 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 expert Washington credit monitoring to consumers have one credit expert Washington thing in common: They all sell data supplied by the Big Three. check my credit history The bureaus are the drivers behind a blizzard of consumer promotions for credit reports (a 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 service, credit expert Washington which credit experts say is of marginal value). Thanks to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, each bureau must supply credit expert Washington every consumer with one free credit report a year.

But while meeting the minimum requirements of this federal credit expert Washington mandate, the Big Three have been energetically tapping online shoppers for hundreds credit expert Washington of millions of dollars of fresh credit expert Washington revenue and profit.

By selling credit data via websites 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 credit expert Washington to get flummoxed. "There should be credit expert Washington 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. annual credit report free credit report Experian, for instance, sells to consumers at credit expert Washington Experian.com and at six other sites.

Experian spokesman Don Girard says that selling to consumers at websites using different names "is just credit expert Washington creative marketing." TransUnion, privately owned by the billionaire Pritzker family of Chicago, operates TrueCredit.com, the site where Wendy Temple bought her TransRisk credit credit expert Washington score, as a wholly owned subsidiary.