Annual credit report free credit report Helena

Experian, for instance, sells to consumers at Experian.com and at six other sites. Experian spokesman Don Girard says that selling to consumers at websites using different names "is just creative marketing." TransUnion, privately owned by the billionaire Pritzker family of Chicago, operates TrueCredit.com, the site where Wendy Temple bought her TransRisk credit score, as a wholly owned subsidiary. Another major subsidiary, annual credit report free credit report Helena TransUnion Interactive, distributes consumer products via dozens of independently run websites, company spokesman Steve Katz says. These include PrivacyMatters.com, free-credit-reports.com, Credit.com, Free3BureauCreditReport.com, FreeCreditReportsInstantly.com, speedycreditreports.com and SpendonLife.com, Katz says. Equifax alone sells consumer products annual credit report free credit report Helena primarily through its eponymous website, Equifax.com. how to check your credit

"Our approach has always annual credit report free credit report Helena been to take the high road," says Steve Ely, president of Equifax's Personal Solutions. Joel Winston, the FTC's associate director of privacy and identity protection, credits the bureaus for improving their public disclosure statements in recent months.

But he says the FTC remains "very concerned" about any lingering confusion.

"The annual credit report free credit report Helena principle we're upholding is, you've got to make clear what it is you're annual credit report free credit report Helena selling," Winston says. reporting credit card fraud "And also make all of the conditions clear." The Big Three for decades denied consumers access to their credit histories, selling data exclusively to lenders. Once the government gave consumers the right to a free copy of their credit report, the bureaus moved aggressively to tap the consumer market. sales of credit data to consumers negligible in 2000 hit $220 million in 2003, soared to $488 million in 2006, and should top $860 million by 2010, says Craig Focardi, financial services analyst at market researcher TowerGroup. Though consumer sales make up only a fraction of the bureaus' lender-centric operations, they have become the bureaus' fastest-growing source of revenue. But this windfall derives from an online marketing free-for-all in annual credit report free credit report Helena which many websites and promotional offers aren't annual credit report free credit report Helena what they seem. request free credit report by mail "Consumers face a bewildering variety of things to click on, some of which is valid, much of which is not," says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum. The bureaus make no apologies for how and what they sell to consumers. The biggest bureau, Dublin-based Experian, reported $375 million in consumer sales in its fiscal year ended last April. "Unhappy consumers don't buy your stuff," Experian's Girard says. "We've been averaging about 20% growth in our direct-to-consumer business, year over year.