If you have read any information about FACTA in any of these articles, then you know that this is the law that gives you access to your credit report. Identity theft experts have followed suit with credit counselors and financial advisers over the past decade or more, telling their clients that this is a cornerstone to financial awareness.
There are three ways to get your credit report for each of the Credit Reporting Authorities, or CRAs… By letter, by phone, and by web site. Contact information for each of these is at the bottom of this article, but there are a couple of things that you should know first.
Requesting your credit report by mail is a obviously a very slow process by today’s standards. It may take three or four days for your letter to reach the CRA, and they may take up to two weeks to get the requested information sent back to you. In this digital age when everything happens in microseconds, this is really the last resort.
Likewise, making the request by phone has additional problems. All of the credit bureaus want to make sure you are not an identity thief before they send to the credit report, so you will be asked a series of questions that you must answer correctly in order to get to report by phone. Your guide will be very honest with you, when I requested mine by phone, I did not remember how much my last filing with the IRS was, and ended up having to send my information by mail. Other questions that tend to ask by phone are prev addresses, employers, or who you may have lines of credit through. Getting any one of these wrong will require you to go by mail.
The packet of information you are then required to send may very well be the most dangerous letter you ever drop in a box, at least from the identity theft perspective. In this one envelope they require everything in identity thief would need to take over your life… Birth certificate, social security number, driver’s license, copies of previous tax statements, basically an identity theft jackpot. If you are unfortunate enough to have to go this route, it is probably a good idea to spend the money to send the letter certified to make sure it gets where it’s supposed to be.
The fastest way to get your credit information is over the Internet, but again there are some pitfalls. The biggest is probably the fact that there is only one website that gives you a credit report free, AnnualCreditReport.com. But if you Google “free credit report” you will get hundreds of pages of results. Almost every single one of those other results is trying to sell you a credit monitoring program. The legitimate ones will at least have a link somewhere on their site that will point to the free site posted by the government, but it will be buried and very hard to find.
The other pitfall with ordering your credit report on law is that, like the phone, there are challenge questions that have to be answered which you may not immediately know the answer to. Also unlike the phone presses, if you get into any of these wrong, you are sent back through the mail must send out the identity theft kit in an envelope to the IRS. However, if you’re able to answer these questions correctly, you will have immediate access to your credit report.
Since you can get your credit report from all three CRA’s, it’s a good idea to request them every four months, each request through a different Credit Reporting Authority. Since the information on any given credit report usually travels quickly through the other ones, this gives you the chance to check what is on your credit more frequently, without paying for it.
Finally, it’s a good idea to check your credit every year even if you have a credit monitoring program. A good monitoring program will give you an initial credit report so you can have a baseline to compare it to.
