F-R-E-E that spells free

….credit report dot com, baby.

For the last several months, the freecreditreport.com jingle has been rattling around in my skull, aided an abetted by my niece Caroline, whose skull it has also been rattling around in. (We have started to drive everyone else in the family crazy by egging each other on to sing it. For anyone who has missed the ads, they feature a 20-something guy who ends up in bad situations - crummy job, crappy car, miserable apartment - because he neglected to check out his credit score. The ads are pretty funny, and they’re probably very effective in getting people to remember the company’s name and what they do.)

Thus, I was interested to see an article in The New York Times debunking the eponymous companies value prop.

The article talked about a fellow who filled out a form on freecreditreport’s site so that he could check his credit store. The info form asked for a credit card number, which the guy gave up, thinking that it was needed to establish his identity.

Well, that’s not exactly why they wanted it.

It seems he’d signed up for a service that cost a whopping $14.95 a month.

You’d certainly have to be pretty obsessed with your credit score to pay 15 bucks a month to keep tabs on it.

But it also seemed like they kinda-hafta tell you that there’s free and there’s free.

So I strolled on over to Free Credit Reports dot com (baby), and sure enough, off to the left of the Home Page, there’s this fade-away Important Information in gray scale:

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

And when you sign up for your free report, if you keep scrolling down the page, you’ll see:

When you order your free report here, you will begin your free trial membership in Triple Advantage^SM Credit Monitoring. If you don’t cancel your membership within 9 days of enrollment, you will be billed $14.95 for each month that you continue your membership. If you are not satisfied, you can cancel at any time to discontinue the membership and stop the monthly billing; however, you will not be eligible for a pro-rated refund of your current month’s paid membership fee.

Forget the discrepancy between the 7 days on the home page, and the 9 days here.

The information is there that you’re actually paying for the service, but it’s fine print you might not be looking for, given the sites name and the implications therein.

On FreeCreditReports, the only free credit report you get is an unofficial one, since this site isn’t one of the three credit bureaus that are authorized by the government to give you one. And they’re all obligated to do so once a year - free and gratis. 

Experian - one of the holy credit bureau trinity, along with Equifax and TransUnion - owns FreeCreditReports, and they’re apparently delighted with the boost in business they’ve gotten since they started advertising last year. Sign-ups were up by 20% in 2007.

So what do you get for your $14.95 per month?

Check your Report: See who’s been checking your credit. Look for potential inaccuracies and unauthorized activity.

Guard your Identity: We’ll closely monitor** your Experian^® Equifax^® and TransUnion^® Credit Reports every day.

Know your Score: Higher scores usually mean lower interest rates on new loans, which could save you money.

This all seems sort of obsessive. (Monitoring your credit reports daily?)

But the ads are clever and catchy.

Some folks are looking beyond the clever and catchy, however.

“It’s what I call a protection racket; the companies are charging you a fee and they’re making a promise that it’s going to improve your credit, and protect against identity theft, but in fact it does neither,” said Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group. “The sites are designed to trick people into taking on overpriced, useless credit monitoring, and they do so by attempting to make it appear as if you’re going to get something for free.”

Nor surprisingly, the spokesman for not-so-free credit reports doesn’t see anything wrong with what they’re doing:

“It absolutely is the free credit report,” he said. “It’s not the one by the government, which is why we put the link on our front page of the landing site, and it is a free report. It’s really a test drive for people to understand what’s in that report because a report can be very complex.”

I’m landing on the side of the guy from US PIRG on this one.

Clever creative on the ads, but a big fat come-on that doesn’t deliver on its promise.

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