I'm sure you've all seen the commercials for freecreditreport.com. Well before I got my apartment, I used that website. It turns out that your first report is free, but there's a monthly fee afterwards for basically no useful service that I can tell. They don't make the fee clear at all. They ask for your bank account number, which seems reasonable since they're checking your credit, but that's also how they automatically get their money every month without flat-out alerting you that you're paying them. The bill appears on bank statements as "CIC Triple Advantage" so it's not immediately associated with the freecreditreport.com website.

So basically I've gotten scammed out of $12.00 a month for the last 6 or 7 months. 

I did a search for CIC Triple Advantage today and came up with a huge string of forum posts from tons of people who've had the same experience, and supposedly to even try to cancel you have to go through a 30 minute phone ordeal arguing with some foreigner about whether or not you really want to cancel. There was actually a post I read from someone that said the $12.00 fee caused them to overdraft so they ended up with a $30.00 fine from the bank on top of it. Anyhow... It's highly unlikely that I will get any of my money that I already spent back. I filed a complaint with the FTC and supposedly there's already been thousands of other complaints to the FTC and better business bureau. Whether that will result in anything is unclear.

Anyhow... my point is that if you've haven't used that site, don't and if you have, check your bank statement for CIC Triple Advantage.

This just furthers my belief that credit, in general, is a massive scam. 

I'm not really as mad about the money sum as I am that someone else is getting paid my money off of a douchey business scheme. I'm also mad that it took me as long as it did to notice it. And if you figure there are a whole bunch of other people that the same thing happened to, and probably a whole bunch who right now have no idea they're paying for it... that company is making a lot of money for basically exploiting fine print.