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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."
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!
It means that someone, who has an infinitely larger amount of knowledge about that industry than any Slashdotter, has figured out that they can make the same amount of profit off of the same amount of data while still allowing a percentage of their data generating population to entertain a false sense of fairness/security in the system by saying,"Oh, good, I can freeze my credit report with agency XYZ. That solves _EVERYTHING_!"
:)
It's a PR move made by extraordinarily wealthy people trying to shore up their public image.
Simply put all of the conventional wisdom about freezing credit reports, and all of the hyporthetical armchair conjecture about identity thieves, and all of the poster children who pop up in news articles and brochures saying,"I froze my credit and, not only did it save my life, but it walked my dog, buttered my toast, and installed Gentoo for me!" are a decoy. Nobody knows the inner business workings or dealings of the major credit bureaus at the executive level and the credit bureaus, along with the executive level members of the banking institutions which they work with, like it that way. They'll keep offering you bread and circuses ("You can now freeze your credit report" "OMG! That's going to totally revolutionize the economic system and make all of the executive level fraud, insider trading and political graft suddenly disappear!") as long as the American public continues to generate profit and support their multibillion dollar facade.
Truth hurts. Cue the whimpering cries from trolls screaming "where's the evidence!" in agony.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Why should a lender trust you to repay the $60K loan - the $100K loan - when you have no history of managing debt on a much smaller scale?
The mortgage market is getting very tight for borrowers who can't demonstrate that they have both the experience and the resources to meet their commitments.
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.
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
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/
How can this be? You need a registered letter to freeze the account, yet a telephone call from your identity thief will "thaw" your account within 15 minutes and allow him/her to run wild with your credit again...
I don't see how this will do anything to slow or stop this kind of fraud.
100,000 emails with "Eh..." in them would do more.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
The way the US loan system works has always seemed absurd to me: it's easier to get a loan if you have always been in debt than if you have always have a clean debt-free life. Doesn't make any sense.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I'm not terribly pleased with the inner workings of the credit-granting industry either, but it seems to me it'd make the most business sense to grant credit to people who care about protecting their own report. Therefore, someone who carefully freezes and thaws their own report would seem to me to be less of a credit risk.
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.
Good for him. Too bad the credit agencies don't agree.
Non-Linux Penguins ?