You can get a free credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and Trans-Union) once a year. If you use each one in rotation, you can check for credit abuses once every 4 months. But be careful; you do NOT need to pay for any services when you request your free credit report, even though they will all offer some monitoring service for a fee. Go to http://www.ftc.gov/freereports to learn how to obtain your free credit reports without paying for any service, or go directly to https://www.annualcreditreport.com/ . Other web sites may use the free credit reports as an inducement to buy some monitoring service. If you want continuous or frequent monitoring, you can certainly get it but you do not need to sign up for anything or give a credit card number to get the annual free credit report.
