Talk:AnnualCreditReport.com/Archives/2012

Using the site from locations outside the U.S.

I just accessed the site from the UK (and pulled my credit reports) with no problems. It may just be that accessing from the UK is possible, but I think that the information that the site cannot be accessed from abroad is false. I've removed this statement from the article. 83.146.15.64 (talk) 13:59, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

it's ridiculous why annualcreditreport doesnt allow users from overseas sign in, especially if the user is an american overseas concerned about his credit while he is living overseas. something needs to be done about this. [unsigned]

I was thinking the exact same thing, especially given the large amount of us military and contractors currently overseas, and going through dramatic increases in personal income. It's certainly a valid concern to want to check the effects on your ratings. If these draconian bureaus can keep INTIMATELY DETAILED records on you regardless of where you live, you should be able to view them, and it really needs to be done through an intuitive site, free, how ever many damn times you please per year. Honestly, what is the point of limiting access to this info at all? It's your information, it needs to be open for access. 214.13.141.100 10:55, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't have a source for this, but my guess is that the "US ISP only" rule is to limit abuse by overseas criminal elements, such as Nigerian scammers and the Russian Mob. Limiting access limits chances for abuse. Additionally, if the fraudulent users are in the US, it is much easier to bring criminal fraud/identidy theft charges. Overseas criminals are not necessarily bound by US laws, and even if they are, bringing them to prosecution is much harder. I will admit the rule is inconvenient for US citizens overseas, although I would bet if you pressed the issue, you could probably get the reports via phone or postal service. -- 15:40, 31 October 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.104.112.105 (talk)

Yes, except that for a determined (and full-time) criminal it's easy to get a proxy address in the US; while the average user will have to either give up or spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get around it. The overall result is that instead of stopping scammers it gets in the way of the honest users. Truly annoying. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.16.204.222 (talk) 19:21, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Re effects on credit score

Changed the wording describing the effects on credit score. The previous was pulled directly from the site and read as a sales pitch rather than encyclopedic.--Art8641 16:45, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Refutations:

1. Re the claim that it was pulled directly from the site: incorrect. I wrote the original section myself ("Using this service does not lower your credit scores"). It was not pulled from annualcreditreport.com. You may have seen it there if they copied it from here, but I just made a cursory check of their FAQ page and didn't see it anywhere.
2. Re the opinions that (a) it read as a sales pitch and (b) it was not encyclopedic: Well, I wrote it in a way that I felt was pedagogically helpful, so that if someone was worried about hurting their own score by monitoring their own report, it would explain why they didn't need to worry about it. I do admit that my phrasing was long-winded. I'm not attached enough to my phrasing to bother fighting for it, but I'll just say here for the record that I don't think that the way it stands now is better in terms of usefulness to readers. Yeah, it's plenty brief now, but that alone doesn't make it more useful. It uses the industry's jargon (hard pulls and soft pulls) but doesn't tell a lay reader what that means. A happy medium would be somewhere in between I guess.
3. Re replacing document-structure markup (=== subhead markup) with pseudo-document-structure markup (plain text bolded to have the appearance of a subhead): Probably the anon editor simply didn't understand why that's not an improvement. I'll revert that markup.

In sum, I am OK with the current version, but I wanted to make clear that I wrote my original version myself—there was no copyvio involved. — Lumbercutter 00:14, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for the accusation Lumbercutter. None what I should have said was that I suspected that it was copied from the site. I agree that a casual reader would need more info and have added links for the definition of hard and soft pulls. I am not really that attached to what I wrote either and agree that the solution is probably somewhere in between. I'll try to be more careful in the futute. Thanks. --Art8641 14:20, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

No problem, Art. Thanks. I got a little prematurely defensive, but you were very reasonable. I think it is actually rather good as-is now that the credit history link explains the soft pull vs hard pull. Thanks for the link. — Lumbercutter 15:12, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

References

This article uses inline links to external sources for references. Please add a reference section listing all inline external links, or use <ref> </ref> tags on citations and a reference section with {{Reflist}} or <references/> to generate the reference list from the ref tags. --65.78.213.152 00:34, 3 August 2007 (UTC)