This is a great service, and it's free. Junk credit solicitations are a blight, and a real risk -- the one that hits you right when you're feeling pinched can tempt you into accepting one of those cards, which can easily lead to years of woe and even bankruptcy. Hat tip to "Cool Tools" for promoting this free service.
If you are inundated with credit card offers, OptOutPrescreen.com is the best way to stop them. It’s like the “Do Not Call” list for credit card offers.
About a year after I started college, I began getting credit card offers. On a bad day I’d receive up to four offers from various credit card companies. Having to deal with that much junk mail was a real annoyance, and I tended to throw the envelopes into a box and either shred them or burn them all at one time. One day, a year or so after I finished college, I was sitting in the lobby of my mechanic shop and reading the newspaper. That’s when I read a column extolling the virtues of OptOutPrescreen.com, a service that claimed to get that pesky first-year-no-interest monkey off my back.
So that afternoon I went to the website and filled out the required info (name, address, SSN, and date of birth.) For roughly two weeks I still received the same volume of CC offers as before signing up. After a month, however, the flow of credit card offers had dramatically slowed. Within two months, I was getting NO offers. Fantastic!
My experience matched with OptOutPrescreen.com’s confirmation page, which states “Your request will be completed within 5 business days. Although your request becomes effective with Equifax, Experian, Innovis and TransUnion within five business days of your request, you may not see an immediate reduction in the amount of offers you receive. This is because your name may have already been provided to some companies that have not yet mailed their offers to you. You may continue to receive certain firm offers for several months.”
Here’s how it works: Once you sign up for the service, they will then send your information to the companies that provide consumer credit reporting services (Equifax, Experian, Innovis and TransUnion.) These companies will then take you off the mailing lists they distribute to credit card companies and you will stop receiving offers from those credit card companies. Simple as that.
The website states your request to opt-out of CC offers is good for five years, however this can change if you sign up for a service that sells your name and address to CC companies, or apply for a credit card. I noticed recently after purchasing a website domain and space to set up a friends’ commercial website, the credit card offers started pouring in again. I went back to OptOutPrescreen.com and re-applied. I thought now would be an apropos moment to write a review of this great resource.
Finally, they do warn you that “while your name will be removed from the lists that Equifax, Experian, Innovis and TransUnion provide to businesses for the purpose of making you a firm offer of credit or insurance, you may continue to receive offers from sources that do not use Consumer Credit Reporting Companies to compile their lists.”
Great service, highly recommended.
-- Owen Kelly
OptOutPrescreen.com
Free
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