You have probably seen those rather clever "Free Credit Report" commercials featuring a guy singing about how his life was ruined by an identity thief, which could've been avoided if he'd checked his credit with Free Credit Report.com (and thus the chorus "shoulda gone to freeeee credit report.com"). Web site here.
Anyway, this company is running some pretty borderline unethical advertising in my opinion. It's certainly not illegal, it's just a bait and switch. What this company sells is a regular credit monitoring service, for which you must sign up for and GIVE THEM YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER before you get your one initial "free credit report". You have some initial period in which you can cancel, otherwise they start charging you.
The law does in fact allow you to get one free copy per year of your credit report from each of the three credit reporting agencies (Experian, Equifax, Transunion). The place you do this is at THIS web site. You can either get all 3 reports once per year, or you can space them out / stagger them and get one report from one of the 3 agencies once every 4 months and cycle through each agency to, in effect, monitor your credit regularly for free.
Now, getting your credit reports still does not give you your credit SCORE. While each of the 3 credit agencies have their own proprietary scores they offer, the real score that almost every lender in the nation uses is the Fair Isaac Corporation, or "FICO" score. You have to pay to get this info from FICO, web site here.
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