'Free' credit reports sometimes aren't free

USA TODAY, November, 2007 by Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz

SEATTLE -- Like many consumers, Wendy Temple's first step shopping for a mortgage was to go online to get a sense of where she stood as a prospective borrower.

Temple, an accountant, surfed to TrueCredit.com, a popular website owned by TransUnion, one of the Big Three credit bureaus. There she purchased her TransRisk credit score, TransUnion's assessment of her credit worthiness. Temple thought her score -- 608 -- was just high enough for her to qualify to buy a $207,000 home in a gated community in Holiday, Fla.

"I was so excited," says Temple, who signed a purchase agreement with her fiance. But not for long. The mortgage company, it turned out, judged Temple, 33, differently. It looked at her FICO score, the assessment widely used by lenders, based on a...