Ask HN: Is there an efficient way to monitor my identity
Without _paying_ the credit companies/3rd parties/middle man.
This helped me avoid a bad situation where someone took out of a covid relief sba loan in my name for $99,500. Got the push notification, called the sba, sat on hold for 2 hours. They stopped it.
If you don't want to freeze your credit, you can put fraud alerts in place for one year so a lender is supposed to call you and speak with you on the phone before putting any applications through. I've had a mixed experience with this
>Only one website — AnnualCreditReport.com — is authorized to fill orders for the free annual credit report you are entitled to under law.
From the FTC page
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/what-know-about-credit...
It is free and will stop anyone from opening new lines of credit in your name.
After all, it’s not your information that you’re asking for a freeze on — they created that information, and even though it’s about you, unfortunately you don’t actually own that information and the credit bureau can’t make any money if they can’t sell the information about you to whomever may want to come ask for it. You are not the customer, you are the product being sold. And credit bureaus don’t like products being sold that interfere with their business model.
But calling up each and every credit bureau in existence and asking them to put a freeze on your account, well that might actually help in some cases, so it’s probably still worth doing. Just don’t operate under any illusions regarding how strict that freeze will be, or how long it will last.