Credit Freeze Info after Equifax fiasco – Sept 2017
Please note: this page is just here for myself and my brother. His memory is not so good, and so I collected this information for him to use. If you don’t know me, you should not trust pages like this, don’t click the links, do your own Google or Bing or Duckduckgo searching.
Generally speaking, the credit agency Equifax was hacked a few months ago, and the private credit information for 144 million people were skimmed off into the world wide web. These people should all freeze their credit reporting access immediately.
Good, clear information:
http://clark.com/personal-finance-credit/credit-freeze-and-thaw-guide/
First, check to see if you really were hacked at Equifax:
https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/
Click on the Potential Impact tab.
or go directly to
https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/potential-impact/
Freeze at Equifax:
https://www.freeze.equifax.com/Freeze/jsp/SFF_PersonalIDInfo.jsp the real place
Freeze at Experian:
https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html general start
https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freeze the real place
Freeze at Transunion:
https://www.transunion.com/ general start
https://freeze.transunion.com/sf/securityFreeze/landingPage.jsp start place
Good general information can be found here, this is a “genealogy” blog, totally unrelated to here.
https://dna-explained.com/2017/09/10/genealogy-identity-theft-and-equifax-update/
https://dna-explained.com/2017/09/09/equifax-data-breach-genealogy-and-you/a>
We all should order a free credit report, which you can do once yearly, from Annual Credit Report at the link below. Do NOT fall for scam sites that offer free reporting or your credit score.
https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action
Order a report from all 3 credit reporting companies to be sure that no fraudulent activity has taken place to date and that your report is accurate. Some people order one per company every 4 months, rotating through them. May be overkill? Hard to remember?
A credit freeze actually freezes your account at the credit reporting agencies, meaning that if you are going to apply for credit, you have to go into your credit account and unlock your account with your pin to unfreeze the account, then refreeze it when you are done applying for new credit. The credit freeze service isn’t free in every state, but typically costs under $10, if anything, and is a whole lot less than the headaches you could have otherwise. Be sure to freeze your credit at all 3 credit reporting companies.
Many credit cards have an option to notify you when charges are made on your account through text messaging before the end of the month when your bill is sent. Visit your credit card provider to see if this option is available, enabling you to catch fraudulent credit card activity immediately instead of later when your bill arrives.
Better yet, if your credit card or bank has the option to send you an email or text if a transaction is over a certain amount, then request that service and set the amount to one penny = $0.01. Then you will get notified at the time a transaction occurs for everything! This isn’t a big deal, the delete key is easy to find! I do this for all of our credit cards.
Jims BBS 