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Speaking of credit annoyances, I've seen a lot of "dark patterns" appearing on the credit agency websites for ordering your Federally-mandated free annual credi
by ufmace 10y ago
Speaking of credit annoyances, I've seen a lot of "dark patterns" appearing on the credit agency websites for ordering your Federally-mandated free annual credit report. Their workflow for getting the credit report is structured to push you towards signing up for some kind of monthly subscription to some monitoring service, to the point where it's very difficult to find the buttons to just get the free credit report. And if you do accidentally sign up for their monthly service, of course you can only cancel over the phone during business hours. Just waiting for them to start understaffing these call centers so that the waits extend past an hour...
- gcr 10y agoFrom what I've seen, CreditKarma doesn't have many dark patterns like that. It doesn't have to be this way.
- dawnerd 10y agoCredit sesame is also nice. Sure they upsell but how else are they going to cover costs?
- Karunamon 10y agoThe trick there is to stay far away from the individual sites and only use annualcreditreport.com
- schrodinger 10y agoI've had no problems with creditkarma
- justinlardinois 10y agoannualcreditreport.com takes you to the credit bureaus' websites, which themselves have the problem he's talking about.
- fragsworth 10y agoIf you accidentally sign up for a monthly subscription, call your credit card company and tell them never to pay it and to charge back any fees, because it was too difficult to cancel.
- cortesoft 10y agoThen the credit agency will ding your credit report for not paying your bill...
- notahacker 10y agoUK credit score provider Experian used to rely on dark patterns[1] but seems to have moved towards offering consumer finance price comparison services with the useful side benefit of being able to search for stuff you'll be approved for. (I doubt they get many signups for the £14.99 a month "premium" service now they're pushing the free one alongside it) I can't think of many more unconscionable models for a secondary revenue stream than targeting people who are insecure about their finances and bad at reading small print and trying to get them to pay nearly 100x the price they need to pay for information for some extras they're unlikely to use. [1]in the UK they're actually allowed to charge a small one-off handling fee of up to £2 if you request your credit store. But "free" plus a large recurring charge for bundled extra data if you don't cancel within 30 days was more profitable...
- trendia 10y agoI just signed up and they advertised that it cost $1 to get a report. BUT they sign you up for a $22 / mo service. It is not very obvious that they did this, and it's somewhat difficult to deactivate your account. (I imagine people here wouldn't have a problem, but I'm imagining the average person here). That to me is a dark patten.