Signed up for a credit monitoring service that charged me $35 a month for stuff Credit Karma gives for free

Wasted nearly $200 over 6 months before I realized the free sites show the same credit score and alerts, so has anyone else fallen for one of those paid services and how much did you lose?

4 comments

4 Comments

the_jake18d ago

Man, that stings. It's wild how these services bank on people not realizing the same info is sitting out there for nothing. You definitely aren't alone in that one, I've heard a ton of similar stories from folks getting tricked by that "convenience fee" trap.

susanb3418d ago

Actually free credit scores from sites like Credit Karma are VantageScores not FICO which lenders actually use.

laura_schmidt8218d ago

Saw a news report saying those paid services basically just resell free data.

skyler_jackson2718d agoMost Upvoted

Read somewhere that one of those background check sites was just scraping public court records and charging $30 for what you could look up for free on the county clerk's website. It's basically a middleman charging you for the convenience of not doing the work yourself. My buddy tried one to find out if a contractor had any lawsuits against him and he ended up paying for information he could've gotten from the state licensing board's website in five minutes. The whole thing feels like a tax on not knowing where to look.