Legitimate counselors will usually want a face-to-face meeting to go over all your financial details with you and they will also spend a great deal of time in trying to educate you on the process and how it really works. Here are some important questions that you need to ask, if you want to be sure that you are not dealing with a scammer:

• Who is coming up with the plan, and who can I speak to about it?

• Has this company had any problems before? You can find out by calling your state's regulatory or consumer offices to see if there are any complaints or actions being taken against them. Don't forget to check with the company's home state if you have to, and to run the business and names of the company’s main executives through a couple of search engines.

• How are they paid, how much and when do they get their payment? Since you can do your own credit repair for free, this is why you should ask. It may be more beneficial to do it yourself. You should want to go with an organization that is affiliated with the two main nonprofits, the National Foundation for Credit Counseling and the Association of Independent Consumer Credit Counseling Agencies. They will help you for a small fee that is nowhere near the hundreds.

• What's the downside of this plan, if any? Any real credit counselors are careful to present the positives and negatives behind any plan. When they are scamming you, they will ignore the bad side and focus on the upside.

• Did you contact them or did they contact you?

• Why aren’t you doing it for yourself?

I should also note that you should not be told to make payments for you credit report. You're entitled to receive a free copy of each of your credit reports every year. Watch out for sites and services that are trying to charge you for it, or for those who try to charge you for your credit report when you opt for their credit monitoring service.

Your credit report will not change no matter what is claimed and many scammers will tell you that you are to pay for the entire report but can get a portion of it for free. The fact that many say this is disturbing, but it happens every day.  

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