Equifax keeps charging me because they are a credit reporting agency that is legally allowed to collect fees from me in exchange for providing me with credit information.
Equifax is one of those companies that you may have pulled your credit report or credit score from and thus been shocked to find the company continues to deduct charges from your bank or credit card after you thought you had canceled your subscription. Regrettably, this is a problem that many people have with Equifax with which they have had an opportunity to file a complaint. Well, why does the company continue to bill individuals who no longer desire their goods or services? Here, several possible reasons could be given:
The first reason is that Equifax makes it very hard to cancel it and that is why people end up with subscriptions or memberships they never signed up for. The cancellation process is cumbersome and tucked deep into the fine print on their website. Some clients have the perception that they have cancelled their subscriptions when in actual sense they have not cancelled them in the right way. Thus, Equifax continues to take money from customers even when they do not actively need or use the credit monitoring.
Another issue is that some credit or identity protection subscription services offered by Equifax are annual, which means that they will renew themselves the next year if the consumers do not cancel them themselves. The responsibility is placed on the customer to remember when their plan is due for renewal, and when to cancel before the renewal fee is charged to their account. This was the case for me, if you forget that your subscription is on auto-renewal or you never knew that it is so then you are charged for another year. This often comes as a surprise to many people who expect that their subscription will just expire when their agreed term is over.
Further, some of the customers have noted that even when they have completed the process of cancellation, the subscription did not cancel, and they kept on noticing Equifax charges. Maybe it was a mistake from Equifax or people get charged for something they believed they had unsubscribed from the service. This means more trips to the doctor’s office, in an attempt to correct this and get charges overturned.
Equifax also abuses pre-ticked check-boxes during sign-up processes online, where people are enrolled in other products or services that they did not know were subscribed for. For example, to get a free trial, one may tick a check box implying that you subscribe to the full-price subscription after the free trial subscription. It is often the case where customers would not be careful enough to uncheck these boxes which in the long run makes them subscribe to the various costly Equifax products.
The company also creates a lot of hurdles that do not let the customer get back their money even if the charges are applied wrongly. Getting to talk to an agent of Equifax and dispute a charge on their credit report is usually a frustrating process that takes time. And not all agents are willing to offer refunds and this is especially so where the subscription was for products that had the option of auto-renewal as per the company’s policy.
Sometimes a client may find that Equifax is still billing him/her because of mistakes in data or the system that associated the wrong payment information with an account. Solving these problems is not an easy task as there are many attempts to be made to change the connections, which leads to the appearance of repeated bills when the customers of Equifax support forget the payment options, which are now invalid.
Although helpful and useful in the creation and maintenance of your financial identity, Equifax’s recurring enrollment policy despite a customer’s decision otherwise has received some levels of backlash. The same remains the responsibility of the consumer to monitor subscription expiry, cancellation confirmations, pre-ticked boxes, and methods of payment so that one does not fall victim to charges by Equifax. It can be quite cumbersome to keep track of all these elements just to ensure that you do not end up being charged for something that is no longer of use to you.
So if you were among those who have attempted to cancel your subscription with Equifax and failed, or if you are still seeing mysterious charges appearing on your credit card bill, then you can relax because you are not alone. I also recommend that you notify your bank or credit card provider and contest any payment(s) temporarily. You can also file complaints with these agencies widely Equifax, detailing what you have gone through over the period. While it may not be so easy to reverse the charges or stop further billing when dealing with Equifax, the only practical thing that one can do is to keep on questioning the charges and seeking to take the matter to regulatory bodies.
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