It's still happening since the last Ripoff Report on this "company" by Kevin in Frederick, Maryland, 6/16/2005 (Report: #146369) However, it may now be worse. We too went to TransUnion and were navigated to TrueCredit at the first of 2007. There was one free credit report, which we received, so we signed up for TrueCredit's $ 9.95 monthly report (which they said could be cancelled anytime).
Unlike Kevin's experience, our Username/Password never worked and we immediately called Customer Service. Customer Service turns out to be a non-English speaking group who knew so little about TrueCredit that they were not able to answer questions about our account, but they promised to repair the problem with the website. We kept calling several times per week and getting the same, "I see you, will be okay, is now you okay" kind of message, but we never once got the website to work. Meanwhile they are withdrawing $9.95 each month from our account.
When you call and cancel this account, they continue to withdraw $9.95. After five months we told the bank that we had cancelled our service and to stop further withdrawls by TrueCredit, to which they replied that their agreement with them wouldn't allow the bank to do that. By the seventh month we asked an officer of our bank if these funds could be withdrawn if we closed the account and opened one with another bank. The withdrawals ceased!
Calls were placed to TureCredit several times per week. They insisted that they had never withdrawn any funds from our account, however faced with proof provided by our bank they said that there was a terrible "mix-up" and that we would be receiving a refund check for $69.65 in a few days. Of course this never happened. Seven or eight calls latter we were having to explain the whole thing over everytime, and being promised that a check was "in the mail" each time. None were received.
We placed a conference call to TrueCredit's San Luis Obispo, CA office on 8/06/07 which was handled by someone who refused to identify himself other than "Glenn" informing us that there would be no refund because TrueCredit's only obligation was to "monitor" our credit, not to provide reports!
That's not what the website says; it specifies report. We asked to speak to a supervisor, to which he agreed and promptly hung up, a policy that we had already encountered every time a supervisor was requested. We have not gotten any service or refund.
Our experience was shared on 9 Scam Reporting websites and we have learned from a responses that this experience has been reported thousands of times. Imagine a scam with only 1,000,000 million "customers" for which no goods or services need be given and the gross revenue from that being close to $10,000,000 per month. That's probably enough to keep you out of prison.
A real distrubing addendum to this situation is that our FICO score from TransUnion began dropping below 700 for absolutely no reason each month, after the second month that we began complaining!
The proper Government/Business agencies have received complaints from us, but we learned that they have been getting many thousands of complaints on TrueCredit for years and they are still operating. If anyone has an idea of how to stop them, we would love to know. Meanwhile beware!
Caillou
El Dorado, Arkansas
U.S.A.