Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Watch Out for Your Free Credit Report

Thanks to the folks at WindowsXP News for bringing this bit of information to my attention. I wasn't really aware of this situation, so I thought you might find it useful also.

It seems that one of the latest phishing e-mail scams has to do with receiving a free copy of your credit report. These new scams are a result of Congressional legislation that entitles you to one free copy of your credit report once a year. The scam e-mails can be classified into two categories: The first type e-mail is from a credit monitoring service that offers to get you your "free" report, but usually involves some additional fees.

The second type, the really dangerous ones, are the phishing scams that are trying to get you to release your personal information so they can steal your identity.

If you really want a copy of your credit report for free, here is how to go about it. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the only place online that is authorized to issue your free credit report is annualcreditreport.com. It is a secure web site and you can easily request your report without fear and ignore the e-mails.

By the way, if you want to check to see if any e-mail you receive might be a scam, you can head over to scambusters.org. It is a good web site full of very interesting info about web and e-mail scams, although it does have a fair amount of ads. In fact, some of their ads are at the very top of their pages, and at first I thought the ads were part of the scam listings. I might think twice about advertising on their web site.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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