I received notice in my inbox this morning that a comment had been left on my Fat Man’s Daughter blog. Then I found the EXACT same comment at my other blog (this one). Gee, do you think it is really spam?

I know that some businesses pay a lot of money to have people comment on blogs or mention their company on blogs. I thought I’d do FreeCreditReport.com a favor and mention them (although the mention is not favorable) on my blog.

I confess. I like the commercials for this site. The catchy jingle, sad looking car and the pirate’s uniform snagged me. I logged on to get my free credit report.

I signed up, answered security questions, and I was refused entry. I never did get that free credit report. I was frustrated, but it wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t have a dying need to access my free report. I logged off and forgot about it.

Five days later I received a letter with a code that if I wanted to try again, I’d need to log in. This time, the letter promised, I really WOULD get access to my free credit report. I threw it away without even trying.

Yesterday, I logged onto my bank and saw a pending charge of $14.95 by C*CE CIC Credit Report, or some such thing. There was an account number that was really an 800 number. I called my husband to ask if he’d done it. Nope. I called my bank. They clued me in that the account number was an 800 number. I called the 800 number.

The lady who answered was nice and had a southern accent. She asked me my name. I explained my problem. She said, “If you give me your credit card number and/or your social security number, I can take care of it for you.”

Why, yes! I would love to give these things to you. After all, it isn’t as if I am calling to already dispute a trumped-up charge….. Needless to say, I declined. She was able to locate my information through my e-mail address. Imagine that!

It turns out freecreditreport.com defines free a little bit differently than me. I define free as in “we won’t charge you for giving you something.” They define free as “We won’t give you anything but frustration and then seven-days later we will charge you $14.95 for something you never received.”

The lady I talked to was able to pull up my account and see that yes, I had not actually accessed the account. I had not received anything, and pretty much all I did was sign up. AND YET, they were charging me.

She did cancel my account. The charge was going to go through, and I was assured I would be reimbursed in “7 to 10 days.”

I explained (very nicely) that this method of doing business did not make me happy. If they can see I didn’t ever get anything, primarily because THEY stopped me, they should not charge my account. It made me think this was their normal way of operation, which seems to be SCAM!

And there’s my recommendation for today — stay away from freecreditreport.com, which is operated by CreditExpress (I think that’s the name), which also operates several other of these types of sites.