YSK: You can and should freeze your credit reporting accounts at all 3 providers (for US users)
YSK: You can and should freeze your credit reporting accounts at all 3 providers (for US users)
Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian all offer account freezing for free. Take advantage of it! It is a great way to prevent someone from wrecking your credit
We can thank US Government for FORCING these companies to allow you to freeze your credit report. It used to be a state by state thing, else you had to pay them like $10 to freeze and unfreeze, unless you had PROOF that your identity was stolen.
Especially considering Equifax had that little "oopsy" (they already leaked all your personal info) 7 years ago, you should absolutely 100% freeze your credit report.
YES you have to unfreeze it when you're needed to check your credit, but how often does that happen?
Honestly it's a great excuse to turn down a pushy salesman as well. "Well I really wanna buy this car, but I have to unfreeze my credit report first and my info is at home, so I'll be back."
And do you REALLY need that 10th credit card for get that $10 coupon for Khols? Nah.
It's a bit of work to set up, but once you set it up don't forget you get a free credit report yearly from each bureau. So space them out every 4 months and then check them yearly.
Have you froze it recently though? They bury the fucking options and make it as painful as possible all while trying to sell you $20 a month monitoring services. Seriously equifax? Why would I PAY your backward, half assed company money to sell AND leak my data? What the christ!
I used McAfee.
I just froze all 3 of mine and nothing was hidden. In fact everything was very obvious.
Equifax did try to make me use a lock feature instead of a freeze, but I found the freezer at my.equifax.com
The main difference between the lock and freezer is your legal recourse it seems so definitely use the freeze.
Honestly it's a great excuse to turn down a pushy salesman as well. "Well I really wanna buy this car, but I have to unfreeze my credit report first and my info is at home, so I'll be back."
Friendly reminder: "No" is a complete sentence. You don't owe anyone anything.
Most credit card companies provide free monthly checks to your credit so you don’t even need the yearly free checks. I just opened another line of credit and got a notification from discover 2 days later and email from them and capital one. It’s an included service that you should take advantage of.
Related: YSK that if someone opens an account in your name or uses your credit cards without your permission, you're not legally obligated to pay for those fraudulent debts or transactions. You can call the lender and tell them that it's fraud.
And spend hundreds of hours fighting the collections they send after you regardless.
I had someone open a Verizon account with my info and I only found out when it showed up on my credit report as a collections account. Every single person there tried to tell me the account didn't exist and there was nothing they could do. I even had one fuckin rep try to get me up open a new account so they could use it to look up the other account, because apparently sounded like a complete moron. I ended up reporting it to the secretary of state and wouldn't you know Verizon found the account for them on the first try.
SLPT: Get together with a friend and open accounts in eachothers name and use them for all your purchases. It’s basically free money.
Does it seem unethical to anyone else that Experian reports credit scores and also has a service to boost your credit score? Like "pay us or else we'll tell people you're poor."
I mean, the whole idea of credit scores in general is just a scam to keep poor people poor (and more specifically - in debt), and to create work for a new kind of companies - those standing between us and our "score" (which isn't even measured consistently, but changes from agency to agency) and who we have to provide with access to our most personal and sensitive data to access (which they then sell on to add to their record profits).
Yes and it was also unethical for them to be allowed to simply give you a year of this shitty service for free as compensation for allowing hackers to access all of our personal information.
Guaranteed all that data is still being sold and resold over and over again. Who even knows how many people have everyone's info at this point and they didn't even get a slap on the wrist, nor has anything been done to unlink our financial security from our SSN. It's disgusting.
It’s also just for Experian, and not all lenders take it into account. If your lender prefers to use Transunion for example, then it doesn’t mean shit.
Source: I had a 750+ score according to Experian with boost, but Transunion had me at blank due to using a debit card only for 15 years and paying off all my debt. Chase wouldn’t give me a card because they only wanted to pull from Transunion, and they didn’t give a crap about Experian.
I would like just to thank you for writing to title that it's US-specific. I mean, it was clear by the time I finished the title, but that's not always the case and I was really glad that you put it there.
Why make this post if you're not going to bother posting the links?
Experian
1-888-397-3742
Equifax
1-800-685-1111
www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze/
TransUnion
(888) 909-8872
Thanks for adding links! Note taken
You should also place a security freeze on opening new bank and checking accounts in your name. Something almost nobody knows about..
Do you know if a credit freeze cover this case too?
No this is for bank and checking accounts. I had someone try to open a bank account at a bank I've never visited. I have never heard that you can block this too. Just be aware if you want a new bank account to do the temporary freeze lift similar to credit cards.
I did this when the Equifax breaches happened.
Freezing the accounts definitely had negative impacts on my credit score, despite having safe CC utilization and no debt. I saw about a 20 point dip from doing it.
Sure they claim it won't have any effect but being safe is risky behavior to a business that relies on you being unsafe.
I also did it at that time. I was afraid it was going to be an inconvenience, but its only come up twice in all that time.
For people considering it, you can request a short-term thaw any time you know you're going to be doing something that requires a credit check. That way it gets refrozen without the chance of me forgetting to do so.
I’m not sure why it would impact a credit score. But to be fair, the calculation of credit score is not at all transparent
I can't see how freezing your accounts led to a decrease in your credit score. It could have been something simple like credit utilization (higher credit card bill that month) affecting the score instead.
One other thing to note, as a parent with young kids, you can do this for them as well. It's a much larger headache as it can't be done online but a small headache in comparison to trying to unravel credit abuse/identity theft when they turn 18.
That's a good point. And I imagine it's harder to undo the damage if identity theft happened years prior
Also make sure you register on the social security administration website and IRS...or someone else will do it for you.
Also, note on the SSA website, they will require you to login with 2FA email and will send you a slow ass code that takes 2-10i items to arrive. The rub is, if you copy the code with any standard method and paste it into their box, it copies an extra space character and pastes it, invisibly into the 2FA code box, which then fails. Took me a few weeks to work this out...they have a link to login support from the same page...wonder why they get issues?!? You have to type it in manually and only if you know this issue exists.
I opened a ticket with their IT for the good of the world....fuck the contractor who made that webpage.
I felt lots of stress on your behalf by just reading that ☠️