- Protect Your Identity: Freezing your credit prevents fraudsters from opening accounts in your name, keeping your financial future secure.
- Simple & Free: Set up a credit freeze easily with all three major bureaus and lift it temporarily when needed.
It’s quite probable that “the bad guys” already have access to some of your personal information, including financial identifiers such as your Social Security Number (SSN), bank account and credit card numbers, and date of birth.
The result? Criminals can attempt to assume your identity using some of those identifiers, and then, pretending to be you, they might open credit cards or apply for bank loans in your name. And, if not caught quickly, you can find yourself in massive debt without having spent a dime.
The three major credit bureaus (TransUnion, Equifax and Experian) collect and track your credit history and release your credit scores when new loans are sought. Banks and credit issuers use the credit bureaus to confirm that a credit application is legitimate. Unfortunately, with enough information about you, criminals can sometimes slip by those protections.
The Best Prevention
While all of the three major credit bureaus can detect fraud in many cases, the best way to avoid the problem is to create a “freeze” on your credit reports. A freeze will prevent anyone from opening new credit accounts or loans in your name.
You need to set up an account on all three sites, and to do that, you will need information about your residence and credit history to ensure that it’s really you. Once you create an account on each web site, it is free to set up a freeze with all three.
While it’s easy to set up, the only downside is that you can’t open a new credit card or get a loan while your accounts are frozen. Fortunately, using your account with each credit bureau, you can easily unfreeze your credit temporarily when you apply for a new credit card, loan, or mortgage. You can even unfreeze it for a defined time period, so that the freeze goes back on automatically.
To freeze your credit, start by visiting these websites:
- https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze
- https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze/
- https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
Given how frequently we see data breaches and sensitive data exposure, the likelihood is high that your SSN is floating around on the dark web somewhere. It’s better to take a proactive step now to prevent fraudulent credit from being opened in the first place than to find a breach that you need to dispute later on, or find out that your credit score has plummeted because someone stole your identity.
Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash
