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Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

The kalzumeus.com article is informative and accessible, especially if your identity has been stolen.

If your identity has not yet been stolen, the NYTimes has an article titled "Equifax's Instructions Are Confusing. Here's What to Do Now." [0]

tl;dr: Freeze requests for your credit data at the big 3: Equifax [1], Experian [2], and Transunion [3].

(Note: these services may require multiple attempts, some persistence, a service fee, or a phone call to an automated system. YMMV.)

  [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/your-money/identity-theft/equifaxs-instructions-are-confusing-heres-what-to-do-now.html
  [1] https://www.freeze.equifax.com/Freeze/jsp/SFF_PersonalIDInfo.jsp
  [2] https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
  [3] https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze/place-credit-freeze

EDIT: missing word

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Very useful links. Thanks.

I'd like to know how I can determine what services have such a hold in place for me.

This is all pretty absurd. Why should we have to pay to not have our credit history disclosed? We should pay when we want to have it disclosed.

Then I would have to pay THREE different companies to not disclose it. Or keep track of which ones won't disclose it.

The European model of you owning your own information is making more and more sense.

It sounds like extortion to me. I wouldn't be surprised if the data leak was an intentional move to provide incentive to people to sign up for their credit monitoring services or unfreeze fees.

When a company "pulls" your credit they are not given the report for free. Equifax and the like sell a credit reporting service to banks and other companies who would want to see your credit history. When you freeze your report, reporting agencies are not allowed to sell your report to anyone, at your request, meaning they are losing revenue. The freeze fee makes sense when you realize your report is the product they are selling. "You're not allowing us to make money? Fine, then you need to help make up the difference with a fee." Just like stockbrokers, they are intent on making money both coming and going.

That doesn't justify it.

I'm not arguing the merits of a policy or defending the CRAs, I'm shedding light on some of the reasons why it exists.

Maybe what we need is an open source blockchain application that keeps track of every event in your credit history, with YOU authorizing every view.

Every time you use credit, you'd be authorizing that creditor to add events to the records for that use, until they mark it paid off. Otherwise, nothing else gets into your history. And you'd be able to comment on any of those events, of course.

Of course, it would also need to support multi factor authentication and keep all data related to that secure. Might be hard to do that, but seems pretty hard in the existing industry.

It's not easy to believe, but it would be a quick billion for every credit reporting company if all Americans froze their credit.

TransUnion charges $5 to put a security freeze on the account. I cannot believe they are able to get away with this. How does this logic even work?

1. We'll collect all kinds of data on you without you knowing it. 2. Ooops, we've been hacked! 3. Pay us to freeze your account.

How .. what... in what world does this make any sense? How do we go about changing this nonsense?

I'm just going with the fraud alert (free) for now. Maybe it's moot, but it's really tough for me to justify giving all three companies money due to something like this.

United Lands of Extortion. FML

Don't forget Innovis https://www.innovis.com/personal/securityFreeze

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