Small rant: Perhaps I’m getting old and cynical, but the entire process through their sites feels a lil sketchy lol
Sure, it requires the basics, along with your SSN and cellphone to receive a text confirmation. Can’t just be me, right?
Anyways, thanks for answering my crazy questions due to my lack of faith in the safety of the internet in the days of SEO’s. 🤣
Yes it feels sketchy but the major credit bureaus already have a file on you regardless. It is a bit of a hassle to do the freezes but the reality is that with so many data beaches out there, someone could easily steal your identity and open up accounts under their name if they wanted. This makes that much harder for them to do.
You can’t freeze a credit score.
The scores can and usually will still change even while frozen.
What you can do is enable a security freeze on your credit account, which disallows a credit score from being provided to a bank for assessing your credit worthiness of a loan or credit card or mortgage or afterpay/klarna/microloan type thing.
Freezing your credit is mostly a way of making it so that someone with your personal info can’t open a fraudulent account in your name.
There are three companies, credit bureaus, in the US that keep giant permanent records of everyone’s credit history.
TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.
Your credit history and other info can differ between all three of them, if there are errors, you have to get them resolved with each one seperately.
There are many different algorithms / scoring models that each of these 3 will use to calculate your actual score.
VantageScore and FICO are the main ones, and the algorithm for each gets updated every few years.
https://www.creditkarma.com/advice/i/vantagescore-vs-fico
So… you can have a FICO or VantageScore from TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.
Different banks or apartments or car loans will all use different scores from different bureaus, and there is usually no way to tell exactly scoring model they’ll use before hand… and actually fully applying for anything that requires a ‘hard inquiry’ into your credit history… that in and of itself will hurt your credit score.
CreditKarma and KikOff will give you your Vantage Scores for free, but not FICO scores.
CreditKarma will only give you TransUnion and Equifax scores, but KikOff also gives you Experian.
Beyond that, other companies have other apps that may give you scores not provided by CK or KO, but you generally have to pay a monthly subscription for that.
…
If this all sounds like a giant confusing mess, ripe for scamming opportunities, that’s because it is, and it will only get worse now that Trump and Elon are completely destroying all kinds of financial regulation agencies.
I’m reasonably certain they have all been hacked recently, and they don’t take security seriously, because: Why bother? They’ll never face any serious consequences, and their power will continue unchecked.
I mean, this is exactly how it feels these days, and it sorta does feel like the entry field for my information on those sites isn’t that safe lol. Let alone professional, makes you wonder if the sites legitimate. 🥴
Objectively speaking, I don’t think that entire industry is legitimate.
Yeah, it’s a bit annoying. But I think it’s worth it.
For anyone else who is interested, the four credit bureaus in the US are: Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, and Innovis.
You might also be able to freeze you debit score with FIS.
Edit: For credit scores I might be thinking of locking not freezing as being the free option.
I wasn’t aware there were four. I never heard of Innovis before.
Thanks I’ll do all of them, is the response time usually fast? And, it feels crazy risky giving them my cell number these days with increasing frequency of spam, can I just leave that blank? 🤔
Can’t say I knew Innovis existed, wonder why it’s not shared as one of the big ones?
Also, it could be silly asking, but why do you want to freeze your debit score? I never knew that was even a thing until now.
Innovis is a weird one. It’s much less well known to many people than the ‘big three’. But regardless, it’s used by some pretty big companies, and its origin stems from the likes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And some of their services/interface are comically outdated, which to me makes it potentially prone to abuse. And that alone warrants giving it some attention.
Your debit score is important because that’s what most financial institutions check against when you set up an account with them. They typically don’t use credit scores for account eligibility. So debit scores (which are almost exclusively controlled by FIS) can be susceptible to abuse from that angle and in that industry.
ETA: Yes, the response time for the credit bureaus is pretty fast. I recommend setting up a free account with each of Equifax, Experian, and Trans Union. They will try to trick you into the paid account during the account creation process, so watch where you click. But their free accounts are decent and get the job done. Plus they make it easier to freeze/unfreeze your credit score than using no account. Innovis’ process is easy too, and fairly quick, but it’s very old-school.
Awesome, really appreciate all the details. I’ll make an account for each of the 3 and go from there.
Sure there is the fear of a data breach since these sites will have my SSN, and breaches seem far too common these days. But if you trust them, I’ll take your word since you’ve taught me far more than I expected to learn asking! The FIS sounds nightmarish.
Any other information you think might be worth sharing?
Not that I can think of. That’s a good point you bring up about the data breaches. They will get your SSN regardless of whether you have a free account or not. But you are a bit more volunteering to data breaches with the account. So if that’s a concern you can always freeze/lock your credit without an account. It’s just a bit more of a hassle.
Glad I could help.
I froze three and was given a code to unlock them temporarily (or something this was like 8 years ago).
Gave the code to my bank when applying for a home loan. It didn’t work. Ended up just unfreezing so they could do their job.
Costs like $12 every time you want to freeze. It’s a racket.
You got scammed by one of the credit bureau’s dark patterns to buy a service you don’t need. It shouldn’t cost any money to freeze/unfreeze your credit. You can do it online with each of them for free.
Which one required money to unfreeze? Because that definitely sounds sketchy.
It wasn’t money to unfreeze. It was money to re-freeze after.
You shouldn’t have had to pay anything. I just put a “thaw” on mine two nights ago, which is a temporary unfreeze, and it was free with all three bureaus.
If you have the big 3 frozen, that’s more than enough
I figured, but I heard there were other agencies, and I was hoping someone hear could shed some light on it. I maybe getting old, but i like thinking there’s always something new to learn. 👍
