SECURITY

Freeze! It’s Time To Put Your Credit on Ice

It’s more important now than ever

Photo by Giovanni Gagliardi on Unsplash

Here’s something to chew on: after all the account hacking that has happened in the past few years, and especially after the most recent one at National Public Data involving several hundred million names, addresses, and social security numbers, there’s a pretty good chance that your data and mine were hacked and may be exposed.

I had already frozen my accounts at Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion (the credit bureaus for U.S. residents). I thought we had also frozen my wife’s records, but when I checked, I found I had not completed TransUnion for her. I immediately corrected that error.

While I was fixing that, I checked the other companies online and noticed that the S.O.B.s don’t make it obvious where you need to click to freeze or unfreeze your account. Instead, they prominently offer to “lock” your account for a fee. That attempt at fooling you is outrageous.

In the U.S., these major bureaus MUST allow you to freeze and unfreeze your credit for free. Locking is different: it will freeze your account, but not for free, and doesn’t prevent the credit bureaus from sharing your data for marketing, pre-screening offers, or anything else they have buried in the fine print. They seem to be pretty much…