Credit Freeze - Transunion and Experian

I noticed something had changed on the TransUnion website about freezing credit this morning when I was giving links to family so they could freeze theirs.

I froze my credit the day after news about the Equifax breach broke, and it looks like TransUnion has since changed their site to push people away from freezing their credit in favor for their own product called TrueIdentity (like what Equifax was doing with their TrustedID Premier.)

The FTC website links to this page for freezing your credit with TransUnion.

This is what the website looked before the changes were made on 9/11. The instructions on placing a credit freeze were clear and there was no mention of their own TrueIdentity product.

If you want to place a credit freeze with TransUnion now:
•You have to get through a page of info about credit and fraud, and then the action it tells you to take is to "Lock your credit information by enrolling in TrueIdentity." The option to freeze your credit is under "About credit freeze", deliberately passive in their use of language
•The link for the credit freeze is also a passive "click here" compared with "by enrolling in TrueIdentity" language used for the link to their own product.
•Clicking the link to learn more about credit freeze brings you to yet another page that tries to convince you to enroll in their product over placing a credit freeze
•After searching through their page of BS, you finally get to the link to freeze your credit.

This is such a blatant attempt by TransUnion to take advantage of the Equifax breach for their own financial gain. Hence posting the link here again to go and get your credit frozen rather than to purchase a stupid expensive product from another worthless agency.

They also have a number TransUnion Freeze hotline 888-909-8872 but it is not working for last 3 days properly.

Experian's freeze process is not easy either though you can link to it from the home page anyways. Still, you can access it directly here in case they also make it complicated. I tried their site and it wasn't responding for last 2 days maybe due to the load.

Originally Published - http://www.moneyroller.net/blogs/transunion-credit-freeze/