You should freeze your credit, here’s how
Did you know you can freeze your credit to protect against someone using your identity? It actually doesn’t take much work at all to do…
Did you know you can freeze your credit to protect against someone using your identity? It actually doesn’t take much work at all to do. Hopefully by the end of this post you’ll know why you should and how.
Story:
Why?
If you haven’t been keeping up with the news you probably missed Equifax releasing a statement about their data being breached… that’s about 145 million people, mostly American citizens, loosing their social security, driver license, credit card, address, and other data. So, this might be helpful for you. If you didn’t loose any of this information congratulations… you still might want to freeze your credit. This is useful for preventing people from opening new accounts with your identity. When someone wants to get a new Sleep Number bed and they try to open an account with your social security and personal details they’ll be stopped and told the credit is frozen and they need to unfreeze it with the PIN you setup.
How?
Doing this is VERY straight forward and takes very little time. Yeah, there’s paid services out there that will do it for you, but you can also do it for free. You can do this online, I simply Googled “<name of credit bureau> freeze credit” and found there page to freeze. I typically just do this with one and that’ll stop people in their tracks, but you may want to freeze all three.
Equifax:
Experian:
TransUnion:
