It seems like the mail includes a good number of credit card offers. Various companies seem to send offers for their special Visa or Mastercard affinity programs almost daily. It only takes a moment to run them through the shredder, and the fees for sending them help keep the lights on at the Post Office. Besides, figuring out how to stop them takes too long, right?

But Thursday’s daily email included something special! A credit card offer with the magic phrase, “You can choose to stop receiving “prescreened” offers of credit from this and other companies by calling toll-free 1-888-567-8688.” Now I’m suspicious of pretty much any offer that comes in as a spam email (These turkeys weren’t even supporting the Post Office!) but a Google search is pretty painless.

The second result was the US Federal Trade Commission’s “Prescreened Credit and Insurance Offers” page. So what do you know? That phone number’s legit.

So it turns out there are actually three options:

1. Call 888-567-8688 and you can stop (most) credit card offers for five years.
2. You can also stop (most) credit card offers by visiting https://www.optoutprescreen.com/, clicking the “Click Here to Opt-In or Opt-Out” button.
3. Or you can go for the gold by visiting that same link, printing out the form at the end, and mailing it to

   Opt­Out Department
   P.O. Box 2033
   Rock Island, IL 61204­-2033

   .

Total time spent: less than five minutes.

(Image via pixabay)