{"id":28,"date":"2009-03-18T19:45:44","date_gmt":"2009-03-19T00:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.alanporter.com\/2009-03-18\/transunion-free-credit-reports-or-not"},"modified":"2009-03-18T19:45:44","modified_gmt":"2009-03-19T00:45:44","slug":"transunion-free-credit-reports-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/18\/transunion-free-credit-reports-or-not\/","title":{"rendered":"TransUnion — free credit reports, or not?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This evening, something (I don’t know what) inspired me to check my credit report. I know that you are supposed to be able to get a free credit report from each of the “big three” (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) every year. So I started by going to the Federal Trade Commission’s web site<\/a>. I know it’s easy to be scammed, so I wanted to start with the source.<\/p>\n

They direct you to a site that sounds like a scam (AnnualCreditReport.com), but is not. You can go through the government-designed (usability-be-damned) web interface that simply redirects you to the web sites of the big three. At some points in the process, my Firefox NoScript plug-in started complaining about potential cross-site scripting problems, and some scripts on a site called “ezapp.cc”. But a few minutes later, I got reports from Experian and Equifax.<\/p>\n

Transunion, however, gave me this lame excuse.<\/p>\n

\nUnable to Confirm Identity
\nAs a security precaution, we cannot provide online delivery<\/p>\n

What’s happening…<\/p>\n

We apologize for the inconvenience, but based on the
\ninformation provided, we have been unable to confirm
\nyour identity.<\/p>\n

Because the protection of your security and privacy
\nare of the utmost importance to us, we cannot provide
\nyour Personal Credit Report online.<\/p>\n

What you should do…<\/p>\n

* Please return to www.annualcreditreport.com to
\norder your Personal Credit Report by phone or mail.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was after I entered a username and a password (generated and stored in 2007 using PasswordSafe).<\/p>\n

In 2007, I did send a written request to TransUnion for the credit report by mail… I don’t recall ever receiving one from them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This evening, something (I don’t know what) inspired me to check my credit report. I know that you are supposed to be able to get a free credit report from each of the “big three” (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) every year. So I started by going to the Federal Trade Commission’s web site. I know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thumbs-down","count-0","even alt","author-alan","last"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}