Credit Bureau Fined for Marketing Credit Monitoring by FTC

Tom Fragala - who writes Truston's Identity Theft blog - wrote an interesting post on one of the big three credit bureaus (Experian) getting fined by the FTC for selling "credit monitoring," when people requested free copies of their credit report.

Tom wrote:

"In 2005, Experian (doing business as consumerinfo.com) was fined $1 million by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive and fraudulent marketing of credit reports (see the FTC report here). Basically they marketed “FREE” credit reports and then charged people for the services. In clear violation of Federal law."

Tom also made an astute observation about the required disclosure of this on their site, here.

If you would like to learn more about the Federal law in question, CalPirg has an excellent guide on their site:

The New Fair Credit Reporting Act: What Consumers Need to Know

You can also "opt out" from letting your information be sold, here.

There are many out there that believe the current "identity theft crisis" has it's roots - at least in part - due to personal information being maintained and sold in databases, which aren't protected very well.

Guess who has been maintaining and selling most of the information in question?