There is an "official" site listed by all three of the major credit bureaus that they send you to to get the one free credit report per year you are entitled to under the FACT law. I won't post the link to the site or name it since I am not sure if that is allowed here. Anyone who knows anything about credit reporting knows the site I am talking about. This site seemed to start out legit, now it seems to be a complete waste of time at best, and even out of control dangerous with your privacy. At least that's been my experience. Maybe around 10 years ago or more I was going to this site every 4 months to pick up the free credit report I am entitled to get once per year from each of the big three. I would get them one at a time spread out over the year just to be sure everything looked good. For years it worked fine every time. But suddenly around 4 or 5 years ago I think, I started getting rejected every time I requested a report. And strange things started happening when I used the site. I posted the comment I wrote to the site below that gives the details on what is happening. After going through all the forms on the site they want you to order it by mail instead. And oh yeah, make sure to include all of your most sensitive information in the letter plus a copy of your most sensitive documents. YEAH RIGHT... I'm going to give these companies that can't even run a secure network a paper copy of all of that so they can single me out for hacking?... not to mention the postal workers along the way? No thanks. If I wanted to do that I wouldn't need this website. Clearly they are trying to discourage people from getting their free reports since they don't make any money from it (directly)... and they don't provide any support on this site. I don't expect anything to come from the complaint I sent yesterday (below) since it isn't the first time I complained and I never got any response or saw anything change. BTW: I tried calling Equifax to see if I could do it directly by phone instead of through this site. Found no way to reach a person, and after three callback attempts the automated line kept just ignoring my presses when I dialed in a menu number to respond to the prompts. It was completely deaf. URRRRRRRR if that isn't enough to aggravate you what is?! I am generally opposed to regulating financial firms. But that last straw pretty much got me thinking about calling my congressman. There is something terribly terribly wrong with these places and they are compromising the privacy of every American. And unlike most other kinds of financial firms, they have a privileged of being able to legally gather and store private information about you without your direct consent or knowledge. From what has been reported in the news recently, and for me confirmed by my own experiences, I think that privilege is being abused and it is potentially a serious national security issue that rises to the level of government intervention. It's an exception to the hands off rule for me. PS: one final comment although OT. We need to get rid of the dinosaur social security numbers and replace them with a modern far more secure alternative method of identification. If we did that many of these identity theft issues would go away overnight. The fact that we still use this ridiculous broken 80+ year old system of identification tells me that there is corruption involved both in and out of government. For some reason -- and I can guess a few -- somebody in power doesn't want your identity to be more secure. It would not be that hard to do. I wrote this comment to the (unnamed) site: "Your site is extremely frustrating. I used it for a number of years with no problems, but over the past few years it never seems to work properly. I fill out the identity verification questions and I am 100% sure they are correct. But then when I try to go to the next step I get a message that I cannot get my report online. In July 2016 I tried to order an Equifax credit report through your site and after several attempts and being completely certain that I answered the questions accurately I still got the message saying I could not get the report online. Then I received a report in the mail without even asking for it! They just sent it without my expecting to receive it. In July 2017 the same problem happened with TransUnion and I had to order the credit report directly with them over the phone. When I received the envelope with my report in the mail the envelope wasn't sealed! It did not look like it was tampered with, it looked like it was never sealed. So all my sensitive information was exposed. This was very upsetting. Now I just tried to get an Equifax credit report again on your site and the same exact thing happened. I answered all the identity questions correctly and again got a message that I cannot get my report online. This is extremely frustrating. I don't know what the problem is, but it certainly does not instill confidence in either your site or any of these credit agencies when there are so many malfunctions."
