Government mandated free credit report

20 MINUTES A MONTH

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Call, don't click. see the next article.

Call, Don't Click

Calling the toll-free number to get a free copy of your own credit report exposes consumers to fewer potential hazards than ordering online, says a new report by Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum.

Consumers who try to use the official site, www.annualcreditreport.com, might encounter numerous challenges, some of them potentially serious, she says. By calling the toll-free number instead of visiting the online site, consumers are also protected from the potentially confusing sales and marketing information at the official free annual credit report site.

The World Privacy Forum identified 96 domain names that are close misspellings of the official site, annualcreditreport.com. Fifty impostor domains are luring unsuspecting consumers to questionable sites. Some of these deceptive impostor sites lead consumers to official credit bureau sites where individuals would have to pay a fee instead of being able to access a federally mandated free credit report.

The practice of establishing a Web site with an address that is slightly different from a widely used legitimate site is called typo squatting.

Practitioners of the art rely on the likelihood that a lot of people will mistype the Web address of a popular site and be misdirected to the impostor's site, for whatever reason. Examples are anualcreditreport.com and annualcresitreport. com. A person typing in annualcresitreport.com would be directed to a domain managed by a "pay per click" domain company. The annualcresitreport.com home page contains links to Free Credit Reports and similar topics. Consumers who click on the "Free Credit Report Online" links will be taken to a page of "sponsored links." The four sponsored links on the site in this example are Free Credit Report Now, Instant Credit Report, Online Credit Report, and Free Credit Report, instead of the official free credit report site.

Dixon says that the credit bureaus could mitigate the problem by permitting news organizations, consumer groups, and other legitimate companies to link to the official free credit site. Consumers would then merely click on a link, without the risk of mistyping the correct Web site address. Currently, only four sites are able to link to the official free credit-report site: the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the three credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax, and Trans Union.

"The domain annualcreditservice.com is associated with pay-per-click schemes and sends consumers to various for-pay services. The site also uses the annualcreditreportinfo.org name deceptively. Annualcreditreportinfo.org is a domain owned by the three credit bureaus, not by annualcreditservice.com," Dixon said in her 42-page report, "Call Don Y Click: Why it's smarter to order federally mandated free credit reports via telephone, not the Internet." It is available at www.worldprivacyforum.org.

The report says, "The misspelled sites are sending consumers to for-pay services at the credit reporting bureaus, and the owners of the misspelled impostor sites are getting paid to do this. They are getting paid because someone somewhere paid for a keyword or Internet marketing campaign. There is a possibility that the credit bureaus themselves are paying the misspelled sites or their partners because the impostor sites or their partners have joined one or more of the credit bureaus' 'affiliate' programs. What is most troubling is that the keyword phrase free online credit report is being used to target and send consumers to fee-based services at Experian and other sites instead of to the federally mandated free credit report site, annualcreditreport.com."

Residents who live west of the Mississippi (roughly) are eligible by law to receive a free copy of their credit reports. The toll-free number is 877/322-8228. Careful computer users can go to www.ftc.gov and click through to the official free-report site. Residents in Southern states including Texas and Oklahoma get free access after June 1. The Eastern states and entire country will be covered after Sept. 1.

Cameras in U.K. Found Useless

The Home Office in the United Kingdom surprised the nation with release of a research report finding that closed-circuit TV systems are of little use in the fight against crime. While there was strong public support for TV monitors before they were installed in massive numbers throughout England, opinion began to shift when people realized the cameras made little difference.

The findings come as a blow to the Blair Government Home Office, which has trumpeted video surveillance as a key crime-fighting weapon for the past 10 years.

The author of the report, Professor Martin Gill of the University of Leicester, said: "For supporters these findings are disappointing. For the most part CCTV did not produce reductions in crime and did not make people feel safer." Only one of the 14 schemes studied was found to be a success. Cameras at parking lots (car parks) led to significant drops in vehicle crime. m.gill@perpetuitygroup.com

Gill said that because government funding was available for video surveillance, local officials tended to install the cameras without any clear goal in mind.

Only one in six people objected to CCTV on civil liberties grounds.

U.K. Legislature Oks National ID

The House of Commons in the United Kingdom passed a bill last month with little opposition to establish a system of potentially compulsory biometric identity cards and a central database of all of its citizens. However, the bill's primary sponsor, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, said the ID card bill may hit stiff opposition in the House of Lords. England instituted a national ID card in World War II but in 1953 a national court invalidated it because it gave too much discretion to police officers to demand identity papers of law-abiding citizens.

RFID Tags for Pupils: Not Yet

Parent protests and quick action by the ACLU and EPIC have forced the cessation of a plan to equip 160 seventh and eight-graders at a school in Sutler, in Northern California, with RFID locator tags. A nearby high-tech company named InCom had provided the tags as part of a cash arrangement with the school to earn royalties from the sale of the technology to other schools. The adverse international publicity caused InCom to retreat. Parents had not been notified in advance.