Visit the FTC’s page on free credit reports and look to the gray box on the right hand side, under the photo of the woman holding her glasses as if she was going to flick them at you…
You’ll see this:
“free credit report”
“free credit score”
“free credit check”
“one free credit report”
“free credit report online”
“free credit monitoring”
“free credit rating”
“free credit history”
If you used terms like these in an online search engine to find out about your right to a free annual credit report, you may have unintentionally ended up on a site that charged a fee for its products or services.
Keyword spamming? Could be. Could not be. Hard to tell true intentions, so you be the judge. Certainly not far from questioning though.
At first glance, it looks potentially devious. 😈
But since they are not using the phrases with any significant markup, like header tags, I think it’s just a case of trying to inform people of scams that are founf easily by searching for those phrases.
Yeah I don’t think its blatant, but then again with a domain like FTC.gov they don’t need to be blatant. One simple, non-marked up mention of a key phrase can be enough. List a half dozen synonyms and now you’ve expanded your reach.