Slashdot Mirror
TransUnion to Offer Credit Freezes Nationwide
An anonymous reader writes "In a little-noticed press release issued Tuesday, credit reporting bureau TransUnion said it would begin offering credit freezes to all Americans, a change the belies the credit industry's oft-uttered claim that doing so would be too expensive and burdensome. The program takes effect Oct. 15, 2007, will cost $10 each to place and to remove, and request and must be filed by certified mail. As The Washington Post reports, the move comes as some 39 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws entitling their residents to credit freeze rights. The new right may have little benefit unless the other two major credit reporting bureaus follow suit, and both companies are staying mum about any plans to do so. In May, Slashdot examined a related story on the credit bureaus' traditional resistance to freeze laws."
For me and all the other readers too lazy to read up on this, can someone succinctly summarize what this means for us, what's bad about it, and what's good.
1) I ask to freeze my credit history
2) My history is frozen
3) ???
4) profit
Anybody able to distill this into simple terms for us?
Dominant Meme
Is that it costs them less than $10 to freeze or unfreeze your credit.
What I'm curious about is the certified mail
It doesn't prove anything about the sender, merely that it got received.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If someone were to steal my identity, I would have no means of preventing them from creating credit in my name. This is because I don't have any credit yet. I don't plan on getting credit until I purchase a house. Without credit, a credit freeze is impossible, and this leaves me more vulnerable to identity theft.
In the past, prior to applying for a home loan, I had subscribed to credit reporting services at each of the 3 credit reporting agencies. I have had my user accounts set up for over 5 years with each of them. I quit paying for the services once the free AnnualCreditReport.com went up. Now I have been checking my credit annually. Apparently I wasn't the only one who quit paying for services they should be getting for free because they started scamming the consumers.
This year, I went to go pull my report from all 3 bureaus and none of them will let me see it - apparently because they "cannot adequately verify my identity", even though I've logged in with my same account information I've had with them for years. I enter my info; they'll ask me 3 questions about my credit past, which I correctly answer... then tell me I need to send my request via snail-mail.
HOWEVER
If I login and agree to pay $10, then they'll grant me access to the information, no questions asked.
This is a scam!
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
All three credit agencies allow consumers to request that no new credit be granted. This includes both "instant credit" and new credit card offers. It's a really good idea unless you enjoy kiting your debt between different credit cards.
If you want to change banks, you can always shop for a better rate on-line and then request an account application from the bank you decide best fits your needs. This will probably be a better rate than the unsolicted card offers you get in the mail.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Some states have a law requiring that the credit reporting companies 'thaw' your credit within 15 minutes of you requesting it. For a few bucks, you can thaw, be checked, and refreeze in one day.
In theory you can get a free credit report from AnnualCreditReport.com, as required by federal law. Not to be confused with freecreditreport.com, which is free for $12.95 a month forever, a scam run by experian. My credit had been hit by an identify thief,and I've been trying to get some false info taken off my experian report. The online site didn't work. Calling the toll free number got me an automated thingy and no way to reach a live operator to explain what I actually needed, so today after a couple of weeks I got the form letter refusing to give me the report I'm entitled to under federal law, so I started calling, to try to reach a live human being.
No live response at the 1-877 number, just loops of answering machines that hung up after awhile.
So I called corporate at 714.830.7000, at 5:29 pm eastern. Operator hung up on me. Called back, same operator, wouldn't tell me her name, wouldn't put me through to a supervisor, kept sending me to an answering machine that after awhile of canned ads hung up on me. Went through this 4 times.
I've been meaning to email tony.hadley@experian.com> vp govt relations
Matthew Besler Public Relations Manager ("flack", not a real manager) Tel: +1 224 698 4415 Email: matthew.besler@experian.com, about this, to ask them why they don't answer their phones,
but I'm lazy and didn't get around to it.
So, experian, are you going to answer your phone next time I call?
these guys are just looking for a new income stream.
Are they taking responsibility for the fact they give you sensitive information which might compromise your identity? No. Instead, they say for $10 per transaction (freeze/unfreeze), you can do it.
Welcome to the new corrupt America where we are all treated like some kind of cash machine, be it from corporations or gov't agencies.
How about giving back my identity and life, and maybe throwing in a free iPhone for kicks? Signed, Joe Blow Consumer
Be sure to tell Mr. Katz how much you enjoy getting bent over by TransUnion.
CONTACT: Steve Katz of TransUnion, +1-312-985-2373,
skatz@transunion.com
From the article:
To place a freeze with TransUnion, consumers will need to submit a request via certified mail, but they will be able to lift it via regular mail or by telephone.
Uh, isn't this backwards? It takes certified mail to issue the stop, but only a phone call to lift it? That's like saying it takes a key, password, and retina scan to shut down your computer but nothing else to turn it on. What's to stop a determined identity thief from lifting the freeze with a phone call?
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
1) Lobby Congress with many millions of dollars over many years so that your industry, an entirely artificial creation of oligopolies over which you have no influence, can fuck up your life with their piss poor security and even random errors in their "system" 2) Watch as consumers get their lives fucked up when bad guys exploit an entirely different but also screwed up monopoly that entered your life and over which you have no control or influence (Windows) 3) Charge people a fee every time they need to "start" and "stop" your "service" to protect them from item 2 4) Profit!
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
"Acceptable forms of payment are American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa."
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
The whole problem with identity theft and abuse would be so very easy to fix.
1. By law, make it the creditor's problem to prove that charges or credit requests were legitimate.
2. Preemptively invalidate absolutely ALL contract terms, agreements, or otherwise, which shift this burden. Period.
If there were an economic incentive for security, banks would be secure.
Right now, citibank employees will tell you to enter information about your accounts on the web site in "that email" if it has their logo. They don't know what sites are theirs or not. Paypal sends stuff out that comes from "x.com" -- try explaining THAT one to someone who's not aware of their history. Why? Because it's mostly not their problem.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It goes deeper than that. Companies you have credit with will extend you more credit than you think you have (often in the form of higher limits) not just because they like you, but because it can actually lower your credit score by making you more "at risk" for being in debt because you have access to credit.
This helps, say, your credit card issuer because you'll get fewer or less lucrative offers to switch to other cards because you are higher risk, but it also means you might pay a higher interest rate on things you DO want to buy on credit (like a car).
If you can freeze your credit, credit issuers can't silently over-credit you and drive up your cost of credit at the same time.
IMHO, the credit "industry" is a major racket which only appears to be a marketplace; the customers of the credit reporting clearinghouses are the lenders, and the lenders benefit from lower credit ratings and scores by being able to charge higher interest rates. The credit clearinghouses have ZERO incentive to have accurate records, fair correction policies or transparent scoring algorithms; their customer, the lenders, benefit from consumer-unfriendly policies through both higher interest rates and lender-leaning policies that treat borrowers suspiciously.
I don't know, but I've often speculated that the mortgage crisis, which is actually a bad-lending-policy crisis, happened because some renegade lenders figured out several years ago that the clearinghouses were manipulating data against consumers grossly enough that a market was being denied credit generally unfairly. Of course this blossomed into a get-rich-quick real estate bubble, but the technical origins were in our "traditional" credit markets being lender-skewed by the reporting agencies and non-traditional lenders exploiting this gap.
I'd like to see MUCH greater regulation of the reporting agencies, including mandating transparency of records (eg, I get access to everything you share/sell about me in whatever format you package it in), record freezing, banning scoring (force lenders to make decisions based on actual borrowing and payment histories) or at least making the scoring process totally transparent and subject to regulation (ie, queries alone can't lower your score, scoring only based on borrwing and payment histories), requiring a simpler challenge process with the burden of proof greatly shifted to lenders (eg, electronic-only records not in consumers favor MUST be removed if challenges, lenders must provide non-electronic proof of discrepencies, etc).
I'd also like to see credit reporting ONLY available to lenders, not to employers or landlords or anyone else not extending credit trying to judge personality or whatever they use it for.
Its just amazing how little control we have over our credit dossiers and how much influence it has over many details of life. You can get caught raping a 10 year old and win a million dollar settlement if the cop who arrests you even THINKS about smacking you, yet even if you're the best credit consumer in the world you can get dicked over by the credit reporting agencies with only the weakest of "rights" available to you.
I think that he meant 'bureaux'
Pedant
CONTACT: Steve Katz of TransUnion, +1-312-985-2373,
skatz@transunion.com Katz, eh? He'll just say "All your credit are belong to us."
"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
I think if he got 10,000 emails saying basically "thanks for the new scam" and it might just raise a few eyebrows at TransUnion.
I've been a proponent for quite some time of an "identity clearinghouse" - an independent government-funded organization to which you could optionally submit your current contact information for the purposes of verifying your identity. Credit offerors (banks, CC companies, etc.) would be required by law to check with the clearinghouse before they could open a line of credit for anybody. The process of signing up for the clearinghouse or of changing one's information would have to be done in person at one's local DMV, where in nearly every state they already have computer photo records of everyone who has a license or ID card.
The clearinghouse would take the lender's verification request, determine whether the purported credit applicant was listed in the database, and if not, they would respond that the person isn't listed. The lender could then open the line of credit. If the applicant is listed, then the clearinghouse attempts to contact the applicant using the contact information on record to verify the request, first by phone, then by mail (the applicant could also request only to be contacted by mail, or could request that all verifications be denied until further notice). If the applicant verifies the credit request, then the lender is notified with a simple "yes" and can then open the line of credit. Otherwise, the lender is notified with "no" and is forbidden from offering credit under that application.
Any lender found to have opened a line of credit for a person who refused to verify a credit request would become fully liable for that line of credit. The reporting agencies would be required to remove the credit line from the person's records. Any legal costs incurred would also become the lender's responsibility.
The system would be funded via a fee charged for every verification request.
This wouldn't solve all identity theft problems. For example, if someone steals your credit card, you're still on the hook (at least as much as your credit card issuer doesn't cover). It wouldn't necessarily cover interception of one's mail. But it would make mass ripoffs of PII useless.
that the whole "credit" system is terribly broken? My personal credit has many mistakes. They were made by people who were, and still are, being paid, at their jobs. I will have to take time off of work, evenings, out of my personal life, possibly hire a lawyer, certainly have to spend lots of time and money to build a federal case, and even then they may not change anything. The people who made the mistakes not only are being paid to do so, but will not lose anything nor pay any penalty, even if I get a court of law to order it fixed.
:)
Do we need a credit reporting system? Sure, but how about that you have to be notified, and given a reasonable and good chance to request a hearing, evidence, etc., BEFORE any negative information is recorded.
And how about accountability across the board? How about criminal penalties for people who abuse the power of their offices (including cops who taze Kerry detractors)??
I'm just amazed at how broken the system is, and at how deeply everyone accepts the system and enables it. Please start questioning it!!! Please let our senators and representatives, both state and federal, know how broken the system is, and we'll ALL live better.
This is not a benefit consumers should forget it.
Until individuals CAN ACTUALLY REMOVE ERRONEOUS INFO FROM their reports in a timely and fair manner,
freezing your credit may only keep someone from ruining it worse if you are lucky.
But you will never get a loan or any credit as long as your credit is frozen.
So this is maybe barely a little protection. But only because it takes 10 years to get anything done with a credit bureau.
Otherwise you would simply clear up the identity theft in say a matter of hours and go on with your life.
But you cant DO that CAN YOU?
Might that be because there are say a few hundred mainframes in this country that have more RIGHTS than you
as computers than you do as a person? This will look like childs play when the national ID card is released.
So opt out of the credit system, because you have no power as an individual.....NICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Identity thieves have more rights by default than you, because they hack a totally insecure system.
And the system pretends its secure.
100,000 emails with "Eh..." in them would do more.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
My husband and I are disabled, and until a few years ago were not able to get on top of our bills. During the years leading up to my husband's disability declaration (I was denied), our credit had gradually fallen, with no way to recover. Today we're doing better, but our credit is still hosed. We'd like to pay off those old debts and fix our credit, but according to someone in the credit industry whom I spoke with about a week ago, even if we could pay them off, there would be no point because the debts are too *old* to matter! All that paying them would do is remove certain 'flags' from our credit reports. The debts would remain listed (as "paid") and it would most certainly NOT improve our Beacon scores, he says. To raise that score, we were told, we have to find some way to get a line of credit from someone who reports to the credit agencies, and few companies (if any) want to give anyone a line of credit if their score is too low.
It's the ultimate catch-22. Basically, to get a line of credit, you have to fix your credit first, and to fix your credit, you have to get a line of credit first. So if for any reason, your credit drops below a certain score, you're too much of a 'risk' for further credit, and you're fucked for the rest of your life if you're disabled, unless you're particularly lucky anyway.
It's as though your worth as a human being has been distilled down to a single, three-digit number, and it is truly disgusting that we-the-people allow this kind of crap.
It seems to me that a credit freeze is similar to the system administrators' principle that you don't leave running services that you don't need. If you get no benefit from a service, why accept the risk that it poses, even if that risk is very small? Similarly, if you don't need credit, why make it even possible for someone else to get credit in your name?
Here in the UK, someone by the name of Jamie Jamieson came up with a way to exploit a UK law that says that everyone has a right to place a "Notice of Correction" in their credit report, which lenders must take into account when they assess your credit. Full details are given at http://www.freeidprotection.co.uk/ but in short, you send the three UK credit agencies a notice of correction stating that any application for credit by you will be accompanied by your thumbprint, and that any application not accompanied by your thumbprint should be considered fraudulent.
It's important to note that the credit agency is not expected to verify that the thumbprint is yours. But most fraudsters would not know in advance that a thumbprint would be necessary, and certainly would not want to supply their own...
I have no idea whether this would work in the USA.
This is just a ploy to stop more states from passing freeze laws. In Ohio, they wanted $10 with the proposed freeze law. Everyone is screaming that's too much and to make it $2 or free.
They really need sued.
I really think you should educate yourself. Maybe then you wouldn't say such stupid and offensive things. There are about 2 dozen books written about the Enron collapse but if you can't be bothered to actually READ you should at least pick up the Documentary Enron: The smartest guys in the room.
First, there was a lot of corporate pressure for Employees to invest all their 401k allocation in company stock. This was pushed by the HR department as well as the C-level managers at corporate pep rallies. Second, Enron stock was GOING THRU THE ROOF. It was EXPLODING. You're sitting there, in the middle of the 90s boom, and you're seeing your co-workers dumping the max federal limit into their 401k's, every dime of it into company stock, you see the internal view of the company, flush with cash and growing like crazy, and you see those co-workers becoming MILLIONAIRES before your eyes. So you invest your 401k into Enron stock and get your boarding pass to the gravy train.
Still, I can level with you that personal greed (however understandable) is what put them in that position. However, there's a whole lot of people who never really had a choice. PG&E was bought on the cheap and integrated them with the rest of the Enron West Cost energy assets. PG&E had an internal stock ownership program: employees were granted shares of the company. Lifelong employees had loads of stock in a company that had been local, with a solid business, for decades. This was their nest egg.
When Enron bought them, they swapped PG&E shares for Enron shares. No doubt many of these employees were excited to see that, considering how Enrons stock was still going strong. But these are people who never really had a choice. They lost everything. And the very worst part of that story is that a Federal Bankruptcy Judge injuncted those employees from selling the stock. Enrons share price didn't collapse overnight. It took some time to unpeel that onion. At the same time, executives like Lou Pai were selling millions (even Hundreds of Millions) of dollars in Enron stock, these poor bastards who worked 40 years as linemen or plant operators were forced to just sit by and watch the stock price plunge.
This was an absolute tragedy. These people were just bent over and fucked over and over by the company AND the government. You really should educate yourself before you speak.
So now Americans have to PAY in order to NOT receive an UNWANTED service.
If ever there ever was a business model that is sure to be profitable, this one is a winner.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I'm in a state where many insurance companies used creidt scores to adjust rates. (This is banned in some states.) What if the insurance company cannot longer read these? set to the highest rate then?
It just seems to me as a user of Experia, Equifax, and TransUnion's sites on a regular basis... TransUnion gets it right again. I prefer to use the TransUnion services because they are just all around better than the other two's. From a "normal person's" perspective TransUnion has a superior product and is a proactive company.
I personally know of banks that have refused to extend credit, or even consider applications, when they see a flurry of recent inquiry activity. They'll look for every loophole to deny credit to anyone they feel "is shopping around for credit."
This inquiry history has no bearing on your true credit history and should not be kept at all since it can only hurt the consumer! Obviously this is something that makes the credit report more interesting to those making inquires and creating additional entries in this inquiry history field in the process, but it screws the borrower over royally!
Yes I am upset about this practice, and never hear it discussed!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Me too... but this is just called a "Fraud Alert" - which I have on all three credit bureaus. A freeze is a different kind of animal. A Fraud Alert causes a response by the credit bureau for you to call and verify the request is being made with your authorization. A Freeze on the other hand causes NO response.
Residents have always had credit freeze rights. This law doesn't grant any new rights to anyone. It takes away the right of credit reporting bureaus to abstain from providing credit freeze services. I'm agnostic in my judgment of this move, but please don't obfuscate the meaning of "right" in the political context. I have the right to a trip to Disneyland, and Disneyland has the right to deny me admission if I don't buy a ticket. If Government passed a law making admission to Disneyland free, it wouldn't be granting me a right, but removing one from Disneyland (or more accurately, from the owners of Disneyland--the right to charge admission to enter their property).