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Comment by kcon | Hacker News Reader

I believe it depends on your state. I'm in California and I had to pay $10 for freezing on Experian and TransUnion, although it was free for Equifax.

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Same experience here (also CA), and I was able to freeze all of them online.

It's mildly interesting how different the experience was across the three. Experian gave me the choice between choosing a PIN and getting a generated one, Equifax just gave me a PIN, and for TransUnion I had to choose the PIN (shorter than for the other reports) myself.

How do you freeze them online?

Come on, that's really not hard to find out for yourself. But here are the links anyway:

https://www.freeze.equifax.com/ https://freeze.transunion.com/ https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html

ugh. even their 10 digit code they provide to unfreeze someone isn't very secure. It's simply todays date plus a 4 digit pin that moves up in the order that someone signs up. For example: 090817xxx1, 090817xxx2. So my wife and I are simply two numbers apart.

Jesus. I think you can provide your own. But yeah, when the user-facing bits are this bad, you know it's nothing but garbage below. I can't believe these companies have so much power.

It worse. It's not even a 4 digit PIN. It's the time in 24-hour format HHMM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15205579

You and your wife just did it 1 minute apart...

I can't even imagine how something like that can be implemented. Even if you put the most junior developer on this, something so serious should have been reviewed by someone. At least do a quick search on stack overflow or something.

i filled out the experian form online for free:

https://www.experian.com/fraud/center.html#content-01

That's not a credit "freeze". It's just an alert system.

All the confusion in this thread is disturbing. If HN readers can't figure this out, the general public is totally screwed.

Experian freeze is here: https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html

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