Credit Karma Review Scam or Legit?
Credit Karma Features
Credit Karma is an online financial service that offers free credit scores to its members. What is most impressive is that the service is absolutely free to sign up for. Just enter your name, email and personal information, and click submit. After verifying your email, you have instant, free access to your credit score.
The first thing most people worry about when they hear about it is whether or not it is a Credit Karma scam. After all, there are many scams out there ranging from the flat out criminal, to the technically-legal scams the major financial institutions run on an unsuspecting public.
The three credit bureaus run the world's biggest legal financial scam. They compile a report of information, which studies have shown is inaccurate an appalling amount of time. The only recourse is for you to correct the incorrect information. However, you can only view the information in order to know if it is correct by PAYING the company that published the false information about you in the first place. This is called getting your credit report and it is completely legal.
The second scam is where they offer you "free" access to your credit report or credit score, but only if you BUY a subscription to a monitoring service in which they will graciously inform you when they publish negative information about you so that you can correct them when they are wrong.
Fortunately, after a full Credit Karma review I can say it is neither type of scam. Rather Credit Karma is legit, supported by advertising and the hope that you might buy some financial service as a result of a referral from their website. However, there are no subscriptions and no hidden charges.
Credit Karma Credit Scores
Credit Karma Warnings
There are some important things to know about Credit Karma.
First, and foremost, Credit Karma does not give you your FICO score. The credit score from FICO is considered the "real credit score" by most people and is the one most commonly used by lenders when making a credit decision. Instead, Credit Karma gives you a credit score calculated by Transunion that is typically not used by lenders. However, the information can still be useful.
Secondly, Credit Karma is supported by advertising. Although there is no reason to believe that the company sells your personal data to other companies, it does reserve the right to send email offers and to serve advertisements while you are on the website.
