With the new year here, now is the best time to make a New Year’s resolution regarding getting your credit history and being alert to avoid any credit history scams. As the economy worsens or maintains a holding pattern in a poor environment, many people are in financial and credit distress. This makes a prime time for unethical companies to trick consumers with false promises of fixing credit histories into a clean slate. In the last year alone, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) already saw a large 50 percent spike in complaints about credit history and repair businesses; expect the trend to continue to even spike up more in 2009.

The first and foremost thing to keep in mind is that negative information that is accurate cannot simply be removed by a credit repair company or yourself; only time and consistent good behavior and actions afterwards can help your credit score again. Services advertising themselves as providing a clean state as a credit clinic or credit physician are falsely advertising and cannot really help you do anything that you cannot manage yourself. Of course you should act quickly to correct and remedy any credit history information and entries that are inaccurate since they will undoubtedly damage your credit score.

First and foremost, any company or service that advertises a service of removing negative entries from your credit history is more than likely a fraudulent company. A bad entry on your credit history can only be removed by time (seven to ten years for items of bankruptcy and debt collection). A company will not be able to pester a credit history agency to remove any accurate information. Another sign of a possible scam is that you are paying for services before the company does anything at all; in fact, they are required by law to collect money only after they have provided the credit services.

Any legitimate credit services will not be able to do anything for you that you cannot do for yourself. First of all, know that you can request a copy of your credit history for free once every 12 months from each of the three major credit history agencies in the US. With the copies, the first thing you should do it check for inaccurate or false information, and if there are any, to initiate corrections for any mistakes as soon as possible. If you have any credit debt, you can try first and foremost to negotiate a lower interest rate.

If you do not want to face your credit problems alone, you can seek out a credit counselor who usually offer their service consultations for free.

To see your credit history or sign up for a credit monitoring service, you can visit our list of trusted partner services.