Forex Articles

In today's banking environment, the decision to offer you a mortgage or grant you a credit card sometimes comes down to one simple thing: your credit score.

Based on information in your credit report, this numerical rating provides an easy way to assess your risk of defaulting on a loan. No wonder, then, that consumers are eager to learn of their score – and if possible, for free.

Over the past several years, a multitude of websites have popped up claiming to offer scores at no cost. But there's a big problem with many of them: They're not actually free.

When visitors sign up, they're often enrolled, unwittingly, in a credit-monitoring service that charges a monthly fee. In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission attempted to clamp down on this practice. It required free sites to provide a warning that, under federal law, the only authorized for no-cost reports is www.annualcreditreport.com.

Yet credit tracking companies have deftly maneuvered around those notifications. Freecreditreport.com (see Top Places To Get A Free Credit Report Score Or Report), perhaps the most well-known of these firms, began offering credit scores for $1 (which it gives to charity) in order to avoid the FTC rule. Consumers who request their score receive a trial subscription to the Experian Credit Tracker service (see Pros and Cons of Credit Monitoring Services). If they don't cancel it within seven days, they're charged $21.95 a month.

This certainly isn't the only site that's been accused of misleading customers. In 2014, the company that operates FreeScoreOnline.com and FreeScore360.com agreed to reimburse customers $22 million as part of a settlement with the FTC and other plaintiffs.

While some websites use the term free liberally, there are actually more places than ever to get a truly no-cost credit report. Credit Sesame, Credit Karma and Quizzle are some of the better-known providers.

Rather than making money directly from consumers, firms like these either collect advertising revenue or charge their lending partners a fee when they get a new customer through the site.

If you're waiting for a catch, here it is: The numerical rating that these sites provide isn't the FICO score that most banks rely on to make lending decisions. While the firms use the same basic information from your credit reports, they use a somewhat different mathematical formula to compute the score.

That's not to say non-FICO scores aren't valuable. They're still useful for tracking overall trends in your credit and generally offer an approximation of what lenders use.

If you're interested in seeing your actual FICO rating, you might want to check with your credit-card company. A growing number of issuers have started to offer scores for free as a way to entice new customers. Examples include the Discover it, Chase Slate and Barclaycard Rewards MasterCard.

Anyone else may have to pay if they want their actual FICO score by visiting myFICO.com. The site offers three packages – some are monthly, some are one-time reports – which range from $19.95 to $59.85. Of course, the higher up you go, the more features you receive. Instead of a credit report from one bureau, for example, you get all three with the middle- and top-tier products.

Just want to read your credit report without seeing your score? You can do that once a year, completely free, at www.annualcreditreport.com. The nice thing about this government-sanctioned site is that you can request reports from all three bureaus: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Because some banks use only one or two of the reports to make lending decisions, it's always a good idea to make sure all three contain accurate information about your borrowing history.

While the FTC has tried to increase transparency, some websites offering free credit scores have found a way around those rules. If a website asks for your credit card before providing a score, expect to find a fee on your bill before too long.