Annual Credit Report is a report based on the information that is provided to certain agencies.  Typically, an agency will require that you give them information such as; your name, social security number, and maybe an address.  The information will be sent to the agency and the agency may press for more information to secure your identity.  Your inquiry will not affect your credit rating in any way.

An annual credit report is useful if you want to find out what your credit rating is based on the credit scores.  Credit scores presented by an annual credit report is utilized by most consumers; especially when they want find out whether or not there is false information.  A credit report is necessary if you want to find out the likelihood of whether or not you are eligible for benefits such as; personal loans, credit based loans, financing or mortgages.  Also, an annual credit report will help you keep your information up-to-date and dispute any falsifying information you believe they may have.

Using one of the agencies may require on your part, to start an account with them.  Typically; Trans Union, Equifax, Experian will comply with requests for a credit report.  You can get a free credit report once a year from all 3 if you choose to do so but any more than 1, from each; will require you to pay a fee to have constant access to your report.  Trans Union, Equifax, and Experian have integrated with a single company called Central Source LLC to handle all of their requests and contact information and each one will provide a single free credit report each year.

Central Source LLC, pretty much handles every aspect of their business practices and processes.  Annualcreditreport.com is the only legitimate site that is mandated federally and authorized to process requests and business practices.  There are plenty of scams that look legitimate credit report sites and are set-up to deliberately obtain your information fraudulently and use them for self-interested gains.

There are over 250 Websites engineered to fool you with look-alike sites or professional looking sites that further compliment their advantage.  Pay attention to every letter in your URL browser to distinguish a real site from the fake one.  The scam artists have become clever enough to reroute you to a site, on the false pretenses that you are actually clicking on the link to the real ones.