BP's Weblog

Wow, I read yesterday on Cnet or somewhere about annualcreditreport.com (no link, because they won't let you link to it directly, for some odd form of “security”), the jumping-off point for taking advantage of your new rights (now available to western states, staged rollout across the US) to a yearly copy of your credit report from each of the major reporting agencies.

Since the law didn't go into effect until today, I waited, but went ahead to try it out this morning around 10am.

Nothing worked. I went through the first questionnaire on the site, and selected getting a credit report from each of the big 3. The site basically kicks off a request at each credit agency's site, so you get redirected (with a frame at the top, so you can go back and continue).

Equifax's website gave me a “unknown partner” kind of error - presumably, they forgot to flip the switch to turn on support for the free reports for the new central site. Fine, disappointing, but fine.

TransUnion just was slow until it returned a non-descript “Communication Error”, stating that it couldn't process my request at this time. At least there was a useful back button, which got me back to the AnnualCreditReport.com, at least. This is useful, because the base site uses a lot of secure forms, so you get warnings from your browser if you hit the actual back button. But, still, no credit report for me.

Finally, Experian gave me a bonified, we-don't-know-what-we're-doing error, from the NSAPI plugin level (NSAPI is one of the in-server programming techniques, a bit faster but seemingly less common than CGI). Right, so they can't even make their error messages pretty. Perhaps they're under too much load, after maybe having been the only ones who had a working system at the outset, 'cause the error message says stuff about being unable to connect to a backend server.

In the end, I went back, manually, to annualcreditreport.com to see if I could try again, and got just a “Error 500: null” response. Really.

Anyway, sum result? Wasting 15 minutes of my time, and still no credit reports. I used one of the “free credit reports” sites that's really a loss-leader for a subscription credit monitoring service a few months ago, and it went far far better. Lucky us, the western states, getting to work out the kinks for everyone else....