Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Experian for FreeCreditReport.com

Have you seen those catchy FreeCreditReport.com commercials on TV where a young man who cannot get the latest cell phone, desirable car or new home because of his poor credit score which he didn’t even know was poor because he never checked his credit report before? He goes on to sing his story and explain that he could have gotten his credit report “F-R-E-E / That spells ‘free’ / Credit report dot com, baby.” If you listen carefully at the fast spoken disclosure at the end (which isn’t sung to the same catchy tune) it states “free report with enrollment in Credit Advantage credit monitoring”. The fact that the F-R-E-E isn’t so free if you are charged month after month for credit monitoring if you missed the disclosure and it is exactly that fact that has Experian in trouble.

Experian own FreeCreditReport.com and airs those commercials. The way their free credit report works is you have to enroll in their monthly credit monitoring service which costs $14.95 per month. You are automatically enrolled in the service and have to call within nine days and cancel if you do not wish the service; however, after hearing the F-R-E-E commercials the monitoring service enrollment has been missed by many consumers. In fact the BBB has received more than 11,000 complaints about the FreeCreditReport.com service, so obviously the disclaimer has been missed by more than a few.

The lawsuit filed by a Wisconsin college student says it aims to “stop the fraud and seek compensation for the tens of thousands of consumers deceived by Experian’s FreeCreditReport.com to the tune of millions of fraudulently obtained profits.” Experian is no stranger to deceptive practices and has twice settled with the Federal Trade Commission over deceptive-advertising charges related to another of its credit-monitoring sites, Consumerinfo.com. Experian’s Concumerinfo.com paid the FTC more than $1 million in fines.

In this instance Experian is offering something that most consumers are legally entitled to a no-cost report once a year from each of the credit agencies - Equifax, Experian and TransUnion – anyway, without enrollment in any free programs. If you are interested in receiving a free credit report to check for its accuracy visit:

https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp

If you have current or old outstanding delinquent debts which you would like to eliminate from your credit report by paying only a small portion of the balance contact www.CreditCardDebtNegotiator.com.