I keep seeing "free credit reports" on various internet sites. do any of them work? are any of them reliable?

Important information from the Federal Trade Commission, the nation’s consumer protection agency: annualcreditreport.com is the ONLY authorized online source for you to get a free credit report under federal law. You can get a free report from each of the three national credit reporting companies every 12 months. Some other sites claim to offer "free" credit reports, but may charge you for another product if you accept a "free" report.

The only "free" credit report that has no strings attached can be found at www.annualcreditreport.com. You may obtain one free credit report per year from each of the three credit bureaus. You may get all three at once, or you can spread them out, get one every four months for example and cycle through them.

Be very careful as there are scams out there to trick people into thinking they are ordering their credit reports, but are actually providing very personal financial information to fraudsters.

As Crow and 2nd Anon stated, stick to these tried and true sources.

I used annualcreditreport.com It was easy and you could check out of additional email lists. I do recommend this one, others are also acceptable, but this is the one that I am familar with.