Experian settles FTC allegations
ConsumerInfo.com, an Experian company and national leader in providing online credit and identity theft protection products to consumers, announced certain changes the company has agreed to make to the way terms of a long-standing marketing program are provided to consumers, in accordance with an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
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Many of today's announced changes were completed in September 2003 based on initial discussions and approval by FTC staff.
For 10 years the company has offered consumers a free credit report in conjunction with a 30-day free trial of the company's credit monitoring product. The offering of free trial subscriptions is common in many industries and provides great value to consumers. The FTC first expressed concern in July 2002 that certain terms of that program were not fully understood by consumers. Although the company denies that its sites were ever misleading to consumers, over the past three years it has fully cooperated with the FTC to resolve their concerns.
ConsumerInfo.com firmly believes that the terms of any free trial subscription should be explained clearly. The terms of ConsumerInfo.com's free trial subscription have always been clearly and completely published on the company's Web site and have always been fully disclosed to the consumer in the course of the ordering process. The changes announced today largely involve the location and frequency of notices to consumers about the terms of the free trial offer.
Since the free credit report provision of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACT Act) went into effect December 2004, ConsumerInfo.com has provided full and complete disclosure statements that clearly distinguished between the FACT Act-mandated free credit report program and the free credit report that the company had been offering for many years prior to the implementation of the FACT Act. The agreement reached with the FTC requires some minor modifications to those existing disclosures. The company will make those changes in accordance with the agreement.
In order to put this dispute behind it, the company has agreed to provide refunds to certain customers who purchased its credit monitoring product online before changes were made to the Web sites in September 2003. The company stands behind its products and is proud of the valuable benefits credit monitoring provides to millions of satisfied consumers. The company has agreed to contact those consumers in accordance with the terms of the agreement reached with the FTC.