Thursday · December 02 2004
The FTC now requires that each of the three major credit reporting companies must provide you with a free credit report once every 12 months on demand. The effective dates are staggered by geographical region to thin out the request traffic. If you live out West, you can request one now. The first effective date was December 1, 2004 for everbody west of Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Then Midwest, South, and East become available at 3 month intervals.
The three companies are co-sponsoring the site, AnnualCreditReport.com, to provide access to the information.
For God's sakes, take advantage. We had a credit hiccup about six months ago where the banker who we've worked with for 5 or 6 years mentioned we had a negative report we had no idea about. In the process of cleaning that item up, which never really got clean, we found a card from Citibank we don't own. Only one of the credit agencies had it, so we started an "investigation". They confirmed it was our card. Through our own cursory investigation, we found that citibank had a card listed with my SS# and someone else's name. That must have been a hell of an investigation that Equifax undertook. Someone with a different name and a different address - the only thing that was the same was a mis-typed SS#. I felt like i was in the movie Brazil.